Switching stories mid sprint

October 24, 2009 by Jack Milunsky

Introduction

I blogged about this some time ago and then posted the blog on various agile forums to judge peoples responses.

Most of the responses were well reasoned, however, one of the responses I received shocked me somewhat and so I feel that it's worth blogging about this particular situation once more.

The response I received was "You're not serious you're going to ignore the PO" and "You can't be a slave to the process"

In all fairness, there are many situations under which the need to switch stories arise. And the specifics were not really provided. For example:

How long are the sprints?
How far into the current sprint are you?
Are there stories that have yet to start that is of similar size that you can switch it out with?
Is this a critical issue that needs to be fixed ASAP as customers are complaining and may negatively impact revenues?

Those are some of the questions that need to be asked when making that decision.

In response to being a slave to the process...

Well you're either a slave to the process or the team is a slave to any chicken in the company who shouts the loudest. Lets go back to basics and why the Sprint is there in the first place. It's designed to provide stability for the team to get stuff done. Hopefully you're doing short sprints so it's not a lot of time before the team pops it's head up again and asks for more direction.

If the team listens to whatever the next flavor of the month is, then we're back to square one where there's just chaos and nothing gets done. Seriously, smart people figured out why we need to do it this way. There is strong evidence to support that this makes a difference, a really positive difference. So lets not willy nilly and go changing plans whenever someone in the organization feels like there's something more important to do.

Moreover, in this situation, I think it's important the team asks some serious questions as to why suddenly there's a story that's so super urgent that it calls for a change in plan. Lets say you're doing 2 weeks sprints and lets say you're midway. This means in reality that 5 days ago, nothing was more important (top priority items get selected to go into the sprint). Why all of sudden is their a need to change direction so soon after. Additionally can't it wait another 5 days?

Now I am sure there are times where such a situation arises and that's fine. I would never be so hard-line to suggest that the team doesn't collaborate over this and decide what are the best options. And in such a case, it's important that the team does this.

But lets be very careful how we deal with this. Because once you do this once, it's a slippery slope after that.

So what would I do. As already mentioned above, I would sit down with the team. Have the PO explain the dilemma. Thereafter, it's up to the team to decide if there is an easy swap out that doesn't impact the Sprint goals and productivity. Ultimately if it is possible, I am sure most teams would do it any ways. Level heads should prevail.

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