Developing stories out of sprint
I am a Scrum Master for a team that runs a 3 week sprint followed by 1 week of regression testing. It is becoming a more common practice for the developers to pick up stories or technical debt in the regression week (once all stories for the current sprint have been developed and are being regression tested). The regression week tends to be a quite week for the developers who mainly do bug fixes that are found in regression.
Having the devs pick up new stories/tech debt in the regression week means these are ready to be tested on the 1st day of the next sprint.
This sounds like bad practice to me but I can't seem to find what Scrum says about working out of sprint.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Many thanks!
What does the Scrum Guide have to say about sprints starting and ending, and the importance of delivering increments which satisfy a Definition of Done?
Seems there is some kind of a Kanban board in play here wherein developers are pulling user stories and working on them outside the Sprint.
Seems there is some kind of a Kanban board in play here wherein developers are pulling user stories and working on them outside the Sprint.
It seems to me that they are not really practicing Scrum, mainly due to a lack of testing automation. In my opinion, it would be best for them to slow down and try to complete each item through regression testing within a single sprint.
It may sound counter-intuitive, but you will actually go faster this way than with your current approach.