My team has just finished our first iteration (Sprint in Scrum). One of the problems we encountered at the end was what to do when the tasks run out? Not that it’s a “real” problem, because there is always something to do (outside the Sprint), but it feels bad. Is there a recommended Agile approach? For us bugs was the solution, because somehow they’re always there. But when I say bugs I’m thinking of the kind of bugs we already know about before starting the sprint, not having high enough priority to be included.

My first thought was that the end of the Sprint would be a great opportunity to make sure that the implemented features was truly finished. Do an extra check and maybe some refactoring of the code. I was hoping that this “extra” time would make the quality of our product better and we would avoid the previous unavoidable: Rushing on to the next task without making sure that everything works and ending up fixing and finding all the bugs at the end, resulting in breaking the deadline because there are too many bugs.

One of the reasons for running in to this issue (running out of tasks) was a mistake about our testers. We didn’t include them on the first Sprint. Several reasons for that which I’m not going into now, but we soon found out it was a bad idea. Ideally the testers should have started testing functionality as soon as something was marked finished. This would have resulted in some new bugs, which would have kept the Team busy and made the features closer to the real completed state we were looking for.

So if any of my readers have anything to contribute with here, now’s the time. Would love hearing from you. I know some of you are so Agile that you probably don’t even read this bit because you’ve already started your comment…