The Foreseeable Future

Today I got a classic Scrum Master sort of situation: one of the teams wanted me to create forward sprints in Jira so they could plan ahead.

That's not how Scrum works, I replied.

But all of the other teams are doing it. 

 Well that's weird. 

 I don't work with those other teams, so I can't comment on why they might be doing this. I could, however, take the opportunity to explain why we don't (as a rule) do this: because the foreseeable future isn't very far at all. We have two-week sprints here, and I don't think I have ever, in two and a half years, seen the backlog for an ongoing sprint go unchanged.

If we can't even look ahead two weeks to figure out what it is we need to do, why on earth would we try to look out farther than that? What a colossal waste of time.

For the record, I anticipate being overruled on this by product management, but at least I did make the argument.

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