“Are Hardening Sprints Valid In Scrum?”

It’s Not About Right Or Wrong

I try very hard to avoid dogma. If I have learned nothing else over my years in software development it’s that almost without fail there are multiple ways to success. They all come with their pros and cons, but if a particular approach has proven successful for someone then who is to say it’s not the right way for them to do it? If we always did things the “right way” we would never advance.

The question in the title of the article came up a couple of weeks ago in an online discussion I was in in one of the Serious Scrum Slack channels. I have seen this question come up many times over the years and my response up until the last few years would have been no, that’s actually an anti-pattern. Hardening sprints are not something you should be doing. The goal of each sprint is to deliver potentially releasable software. If we require a hardening sprint that means we are effectively doing a waterfall like approach which defeats the purpose of doing sprints in the first place.

I believe the above statement is absolutely true and to be crystal clear I am not advocating the use of hardening sprints. What I have softened on though is the notion that if a team is using hardening sprints then that is something that they must stop doing in short order. Primarily because for teams and orgs…