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What is the usual approach taken when you start a Sprint and halfway through realize one of your stories is not achievable until another team completes work to allow it to pass UAT?

We've started a story and are halfway done with it but cannot finish it until work is completed in 2-3 Sprints from another team.

We don't want to close it but we don't want to "carry" it over for 2 sprints.

Exziled
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  • This is agile so the best answer is that you handle it the way works for your team. You should have work agreements in place to work around situations like this. What I would do is leave is as incomplete since stories are all or nothing when it comes to being complete and just be short this sprint. Next sprint you will have more since you'd probably be done with it by then. – aemorales1 Feb 16 '16 at 14:45
  • Your PO should be talking to the other team to have the story finished within the current sprint, pulling back a less valuable story from them if needed. You should be asking yourselves why you do not have the capability in your team to finish a single story. Perhaps you should have that, someone may be in the wrong team. Or the story is just bogus and should have been split up into parts for different teams in the first place. – Martin Maat Mar 20 '16 at 15:58

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Work with the PO to move this story to the product backlog and request for your team (a member) to represent your team in the dependent team's daily stand-up and possibly include a story in their impacted Sprint(s) in order to highlight/communicate your dependency. It's all about building the information 'radiation'.

Scott Walker
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The usual approach would be to take the story out of the sprint.

However, it is worth considering:

  • Can the work that needs to be done by the other team be brought in to this this team?
  • Alternatively, can the story be handed over to the other team, so that they complete it as a part of completing the dependency?

I would also expect this issue to be raised and discussed at the team's retrospective.

Many of the guides on story writing (such as INVEST) suggest that stories are made independent, i.e. they do not depend on other work to be completed outside of the story. It would be worth considering adopting this approach in the future to reduce the risk of this kind of disruption.

If this is already your approach, but a mistake was made to miss the dependency, then it is still worth discussing this in your retrospective. Can this problem be avoided in the future?

Barnaby Golden
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