I love scrum, but as a process it is quite light and open to miss-interpretation. During my career, I have encountered more teams claiming they were doing scrum (because they had ceremonies like planning games and retrospective), than teams actually doing scrum.

In order to actually do scrum, your team needs to be aggressive about closing the tickets in their sprints. The burn-down, which measures team velocity, will not decrease unless you are closing tickets, and your releases will be delayed and overall your software assembly line will back up with half-done work.

The team need to have an aggressive approach to closing tickets, to ensuring that nothing is blocked from progressing, and finally to ensuring that there is potentially shippable code and the end of each sprint, which is one of the stated aims of scrum.

Don’t believe me? Then listen to this interview with Jeff Sutherland, one of the creators of scrum, on the need for aggression in your sprints: