Working in a sprint

Right after sprint planning, team members begin to work on the tasks they identified in the planning meeting. Usually, programmers begin to write code and unit tests. Testers begin to write test cases. Ideally, they're writing both on the same set of assumptions based on the conversation with the product owner, some parts of which are captured in the acceptance criteria of the story (see Chapter 7, Scrum Values Expose Fear, Dysfunction, and Waste). Keep in mind, however, that sprints were designed with a different way of working in mind. In the original Scrum literature, Ken refers to team members as development team members, regardless of what's on their business cards. In other words, everyone is supposed to jump in, no matter what their expertise, and work hard to fulfill the goals of the sprint committed in sprint planning. That means developers could pick up testing tasks, testers could write user documentation or perhaps make a schema change, if that's the way the...