Finish your sprint in time!

In time, in time, in time (echo, echo, echo).

Yeah right, in time... Which time are you referring to? Your time, our time. Probably the sprint time. And why is it so important to you to finish sprints at all costs. Isn't it more valuable to serve the customers needs? What is it with you all?
First of all, I know what's behind this. We want to be experts at estimating the sprint length, or better: estimate what's going to be build. It's a way to get better at scrum. But what's the importance of speed milestones when your scrum team is developing at the most effective way or still is growing on that? What do you want to accomplish with that kind of stirring up? The only thing you get is incensed team members if they lack finishing the sprint, even if they are one story point in disadvantage.
So stop the frustrations and just focus on getting better. There are more ways to become better than trying to finish the sprint. Like pushing yourself to the limit and know the failures that you will make are guidelines to become just even better!
For a long time people thought that one mile could not be run below 4 minutes. Like the sound barrier in aviation. Those things could not be overcome. But the record of one mile is now at 3:43 and the sound barrier was by far not the end point of speed. We push ourselves cause we want to be better. When we don't: we won't. If you're at peace with your performance, you will not get better. If you are always doing the things you are good at, you will never, ever get better than you are now. You must want to get better and focus on the things you do worst and try over and over again. Then the boundaries will leap further than you ever could imagine.
You are not a failure and you absolutely fail no one if you do not manage to finish the sprint in time, in time, in time...

I'm always right!

Okay, what about these blogs? If you may not know, I'm not writing blogs to let you think that I am always right. I'm surely not pretending to be someone who knows it all. Then what am I writing for?

When I'm not sure about something, I have the tendency to seek for answers elsewhere. When I want to support anything to persuade someone toward my opinions, I seek for a foundation. Now here come the tricky thing: I got the lurch to seek out for my answers on Google. Most of the time I get what I want to sustain in my opinion. Don't get me wrong on this, cause I gotta say, Google helps me with thinking and triggers me with the keywords it presents with the hits I find. I read opinions, counter opinions, evangelism, opinions of doom thinkers and replies in forum post answers.

Searching for what we want to find.

The thing is, I realized, when I'm googeling, I'm searching with keywords which underpin my opinion. In other words, I am looking for the right answer. And that's the answer I wanted to find! Bare with me for a moment: Google's searching the answers I want to know, so Google is not searching for answers I don't want to know. That's mainly because I do a search which is suggestive, so it's calibrating my answers.

Wanna try? My sister posted on Facebook that she put dolls into her fridge. Her daughter suffers from a kind of asthma. So the first thing I could think about is that she puts dolls into the fridge to kill germs and bacteria. I always thought that bacteria could only be killed at high temperature and that is at least above 60 °C (140 °F) and surely above 80 °C (176 °F). So I searched for 'bacteria freezer' and Yesss I knew I was right! Bacteria does survive intensive cold.
You see I was looking for answers I wanted to see. What I didn't know is that it was all about dust termites. And if you look that up in Google you see that dust termites indeed die in the freezer. I was too suggestive and was looking for the things I wanted to find.

So beside the fact that I am the cause of the results in the hits by searching with suggestive keywords, there is an other probability which can inflict my search for knowledge and opinions. Google is a learning search engine. It knows what I am looking for. It may not be as strong as we think, but on the other hand it may. I have a history on searching the net. And when I am fond of Dan North, which I am, I think, Google is maybe providing me with quotes of him or people who are in some way connected with him or exercise the same opinion.

The gurus!

The point is: everyone is looking for answers they lay there confidence in. A good blog with a good story is comforting your mind. The more everyone stops searching after reading a salutary blog, the more counter stories will not show up on the top of the list of hits. So you become to like Kent Beck, Dan North, Martin Fawler or Robert Cecil Martin known as Uncle Bob. And you rely on there knowledge and talks. And yes, Kent Beck has seen a lot of companies and knows a lot about coding, but he has never seen your company and doesn't know your companies code, scope or vision. Eventually you have to decide for yourselves what to do with your code, standards or testing. You have to decide how you want to do things or what tools you want to use. Of course you can seek for knowledge on the internet and try to prevent pitfalls which other happened to fall in. But try to look beyond that and create your own interpretation of everything. If you are only following the rules, you are not being creative. If you see beyond the rules, you may see new things and new equipment, new boundaries, new challenges and new possibilities!

Invent something: be creative!

It's like the inventors of the level tool. They wanted to create something new and evolve their invention. The only level back than was a horizontal level and had two parts, namely a straight bar and a bubble. No one ever felt like they where needing anything else. They where satisfied and did not know any other possible use of it, cause they where in a second person perspective. (They did not know what they didn't know!) A good solution to evolve your product is to break it down into smaller pieces, multiply or devide it and re-assemble it in an other product. What the inventors did is taking all the components apart. Despite there where just two parts, they did take it apart. They looked for all possibilities and created something new: a level with more than one bubble for the different angles! So if you use a tool that has a purpose or was meant to do something, you don't have use it only for that! Maybe you can use it for something no-one came up with. Play with things. Don't let any tool stop you by suggestive borders or boundaries!