Thursday, May 15, 2014

SCRUM - Should you add a story to the sprint backlog mid sprint?

The question here is not that there is an emergency story that needs to be done ASAP. The situation is that there are free people during the sprint that are asking to bring a new story into the sprint. Although this sounds tempting - as a SCRUM Master you have to be careful. Even if a developer can bring a story and do the development - there might be no time for QA or documentation to be done. One idea is bring another story and start the development, the testing and documentation can be done in the following sprint - terrible idea. This will first most likely violate your own definition of done and create a QA debt that will be carried over to the following sprint. Instead, focus on working as team more, and my advice is that if someone is free, let him help someone that is not free. There are items in progress that need to be done, so let any free person assist in any way possible a busy person. They can pair, one can do the code and the other can write the unit tests. They can split the work (tasks) between them - anything to help would be beneficial. What you don’t want to have is 10 stories in progress by 10 people – each one doing his or her own story and swimming in his or her own private lane. You want people to help each other, work together, sit together, and work as a team. However, although I feel helping someone else is the best option, sometimes everyone is doing fine and they don’t need help. Then what? What do you do if you finished everything?

So I created this little chart to help you out with this…

I am free! and I want to bring a story to the sprint backlog (mid-sprint)

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