The Case for Sprint 0

Why Sprint 0 can help new teams set up for success

Many scrum professionals believe Sprint 0 is just a preparatory sprint before doing the real work. In fact, many perceive it as a “cardinal sin” — a waste of time, ineffective and that scrum alone is the only way to deliver small increments of done. In my view, this is a nonsense. When applied correctly, Sprint 0 can save your project from delivering mediocrity at best; or failing altogether at worst.

Sprint 0 will save you time from repeating the same mistakes. This is because it can help ensure you get the foundations done right from the beginning so you can navigate your way to success into the future.

Sprint 0 is there to action the project initiation part of an agile project. In the agile and scrum frameworks, project initiation — yes, this is an old waterfalls term— is brushed over lightly, if at all.

Although not officially recognized in the Scrum and agile worlds, Sprint 0 is there to cover activities such as product backlog creation, infrastructure set-up, architectural planning, resourcing the team and test plan composition. Along with prototyping, design planning and test validation.

An example of Sprint 0 considerations might include:

• How do you know what technologies you are going to use?