Scrum : How to accommodate the infrastructure tasks at the beginning of the project?

Anu is a new scrum master. After the project kick off meeting on further discussion she realized that for a successful delivery as a pre-requisite the team needs a lot of infrastructure work to be completed. PO wanted the feature development work to start as soon as possible. Team had serious concerns about the delivery if they start the actual work without the required infrastructure.

What can be done in this situation?

I met with Anu and we agreed on the following

Identify the most critical requirements required for the team to start work. Do a casual analysis with the subject matter expert and the team and find the cost (duration + software + hardware costs) of doing (and not doing)

Anu held meetings with the team, PO & other stakeholders. This teamwork produced a wonderful infrastructure backlog and was presented to PO. She also added the dependency to this backlog. Nice to have infrastructure were at lower priority. This infrastructure work was added to the first two sprints. Team was also asked to do a sample application integrating all the infrastructure work as part of sprint backlog. With this sample application team validated the infrastructure configuration. The other infrastructure woke like server to do load testing; performance profiling was added to the middle sprints.

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