This is a problem. I don't mean Scrum, I mean that people believe the this is Scrum. Sprints DO have a break. The morning of the first day is just about figur

This is a problem. I don't mean Scrum, I mean that people believe the this is Scrum. Sprints DO have a break. The morning of the first day is just about figuring out what threat will look like. The afternoon of the last day is everyone talking about what they did during the Sprint. That is a full day of doing no coding and just talking with each other about the work. Every two weeks. If someone is forcing you to work in different way, then that's not Scrum. The dev team is supposed to be encouraged by the scrum master to only take on the work that they can finish during the upcoming Sprint. If they take on too much work the answer is not to insist that they finish it but to ask what they need to understand better about their work. If someone is insisting that the Sprint backlog absolutely must be finished every Sprint, they aren't doing Scrum. As a corollary I hope no one is trying to insist that you do a release that coincides with the Sprint schedule. That's not scrum either. Scrum is based on principles developed in the Toyota way. There are two pillars in the Toyota way, continuous improvement and respect for people. I'm sorry it sounds like you not lived with either of those pillars. I hope you find a scrum master who understands and can encourage this type of development. By the way, I am a scrum master myself and this is how I treat my teams. I choose to trust them every time. And I encourage them to make good healthy decisions for themselves.