Hardening Sprint

From your reading of the Scrum Guide, does each Sprint have to produce an increment of release quality?

What does that tell you about a "Sprint 0" and "hardening sprints"?

Yes, maybe I wrong but, I understand that the purpose of sprint is to create potentially relasable item, in first sprint (sprint0)maybe I can not create anything to potentially relasable because eg. I' m doing environmen setup or other.
So I was wondering if exists a sprint where no item is created.

Second, I think that hardening sprint is a sprint where I solve my technical debt. If I can not do this sprint where I can solve my technical debt?

Thanks.
Andrea

I see sprint 0 as a foundation sprint in which the groundwork is done. Usually this sprint does not produce anything that is releasable. I would even say that no sprint delivers a real releasable item. The release does.

A hardening sprint normally happens after a few sprints, to tidy up things not addressed by the previous sprints.
This can be at the end or if upcoming sprints rely on certain work done and the work can not be incorporated in the scheduled sprints.

> I was wondering if exists a sprint where no item is created.

Every Sprint must yield a valuable and potentially releasable increment, no matter how small.

> Second, I think that hardening sprint is a sprint where I solve my technical
> debt. If I can not do this sprint where I can solve my technical debt?

Why not solve it each and every Sprint, so that each increment is genuinely of release quality, and the waste of having to do rework is mitigated?

Posted By Andrea Sartirana on 18 Nov 2016 11:35 AM
Hi,

1) can I have a Hardening Sprint to remove Technical Debt and how often it happens, if it is possible?

2) In all sprint I have to create something of potentially releasable? For example maybe in Sprint 0 I can't
produce nothing releasable, is this approach correct?

Thanks for kind support.

Andrea

Hi,

There is no Hardening Sprint or Sprint 0 in Scrum Framework. Instead of answer to the question directly, I would like to ask some questions

1, May I ask why there have Technical Debt? What's the root cause?

2, What's the reason that we can't have potentially releasable working software?

Cheers
Herbert

Hi,
surely others know better respond, for the general causes.

In my project I had technicial debt because maybe some implementation choices were wrong.
And in a sprint we can't release nothing because maybe our sprint was too short and before starting to develop we have done other jobs eg: design, setup database...

Perhaps my questions are due to mistakes during sprint...

À sprint is à mini projet, not a coding phase

Andrea,

"Scrum Teams deliver products iteratively and incrementally, maximizing opportunities for feedback. Incremental deliveries of “Done” product ensure a potentially useful version of working product is always available."

So, Lets think about what is the smallest but high value to the customers/user for the first Sprint or each Sprint. Think about what should be include in the DoD, and try to facilitate to ask powerful question in Sprint Retrospective.

For technical debt, if we don't resolve this issue, the system come unstable, and the forecast is meaningless.

Cheers
Herbert