Sprint model is applicable to very few dev teams. Hopefully it is a trend that dies soon.
Sprint can only work if a team has a Lead, and a good one, whose full time work is driving the Sprint, and has a high level of domain knowledge and a vision and knows how to execute. Without these preconditions a Sprint is just a time period on a calendar and has no real meaning, but causes disorganozation and lots of overhead.
In other words, the most important aspect to focus on for successful sprints is planning.... Duh.. But most teams do tend to ignore that or get it wrong... Not so duh...
That's what scrum masters are for but it seems that a lot of teams I've found have gone away from scrum models all together. Devs like to write good code and play with tools, not spend time sitting in meetings.
That's why sprints have PM. A GOOD and stress is on good can have those qualities u described in lead. Infact that's the whole point of having a PM. But mostly they end up being non-technical talking heads whose only job is to schedule stand-ups and get in the way of people.
Exactly. Very few PMs actually care about the tech at my company for example. They're complacent, they used to engineer years ago but probably don't even know a single microservice in our baseline at this point.
Almost always I have seen the most incompetent devs become pm. As competent people don't want that role.
Well a lot of teams have gone away from sprints. Several teams I've been on would did weekly retros and biweekly planning just so everyone was on the same page but never had sprints or story points. Stories were rated on difficulty but that's all. No actual time limit or anything like that. And it went pretty damn well tbh. SaFE teams are the hardest though for engineers imo. SaFE introduces so much stupid ceremony.
What does "SaFE" mean?
Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise. Google it, look for the flow chart, throw up.