for some time now the team, product owner and me (SM) have been busy with one task: the story acceptance and the ability to get potentially deliverable SW at the end of a sprint.
What sounds simple is - at least for us - not really easy. In the review, the Scrum process goes through the stories and accepts them or doesn't accept them. At this point the sprint activities are finished and the next sprint already greets.
So where is the problem? 2 teams (15 developers) are working on stories to bring about changes to a variety of SW modules. Continous integration is used, nightly full automated tests support quality assurance. Every team member has to merge his results at the sprint end to the development branch.
Each merge is critical, as each developer makes changes to several modules for a story, which at best are coordinated with his colleagues. The independence of stories, which may be given in terms of content, is no longer given on a code basis by the access to common modules.
If a story is not accepted, the changes must be rolled back, usually with collateral damage to other accepted stories. Also tests have to be run again to be able to say with a clear conscience that this SW is quality assured and deliverable.
What is the consequence? We have now reserved the last two days of the sprint for clean-up work: Day 1 is for merge activities and day 2 is for checking the nightly test results with fixes if necessary.
In the team this leads to displeasure (2 days missing), the product owner wonders if this can be done better - after all, Scrum is a success everywhere (?). Anyone who has read this far will wonder how a review works now. In fact, the review at the sprint end is more of a demo, the acceptance has already taken place for logistic reasons (2 days before). An acceptance doesn't take place in the review anymore.
I'm interested in how other Scrum teams deal with this everyday problem:
- a) Will the review be moved forward ?
- List item
- b) Are there approaches that defuse the problem?
- c) ...other experiences?