Appendix B. Could You or Should You Have an Abnormal Termination of a Sprint?
If you have read and followed all the suggestions we make throughout this book, you should never have to ask yourself this question or go through this ordeal, unless your Sprint termination is due to an order from management or the business.
Normally, terminating a Sprint before its terms is not something you would like to do since it is rather demoralizing for the team, but it is something you should be able to deal with because it does happen in the real world.
Before we discuss how to restart after an abnormal termination of a Sprint, let’s go through three different scenarios where this could happen.
By management order:
An example of this is when management has to call off a project or a Sprint when they have to announce:
Lay-off
Plant closing
Re-organization
All of these require the termination of your project or Sprint.
By the business:
An example of this is when, for example, the marketing team has to redirect their strategy towards a new segment of the market which requires the redirection of the fund that had been allocated to your project.
By the team:
An example of this is when the team comes to realize that it will not be able to meet its commitment, either due to a wrong technical decision or because of some conflicts that have been plaguing the team’s work.
As we have seen, terminating a Sprint is almost unavoidable if it is due to management or business decisions.
When it comes to the team’s own actions or their lack of ability to reach the Sprint goal, however, there are things you can do—or should have done—to avoid having to terminate a Sprint before its term:
Reduce the team’s velocity (or scope) when first started on your Scrum project:
When you first start with Scrum, it is always advisable to be more conservative with people’s time and to schedule their time as if they would be working part-time at first.
Do not hurry to make wrong technical or architectural decisions:
To be straightforward, we will recommend that you follow our advice here in Chapters 6 and 7 before you make any decision regarding the future architecture of your application.
Make sure to get management commitment to provide you with all the resources needed before you start.
Scrum or not, there is no way you can get anything done without the appropriate resources.
Keep track of your project one day at a time.
Keep an eye open on your Burndown chart, one day at a time.
Make sure to get your management to understand that they should not get you to take care of something else during the course of a Sprint.
Classic cases of impediments still happen very often in our corporations.
Whenever you re-start after an abnormal termination of a Sprint, always make sure to know the reason for the interruption of the Sprint, not just the symptoms, but the root causes of the termination. Next, what you should do is to have a new planning session to make sure you take into account the new situation and environment before you run ahead into another Sprint termination.