Managing an open sprint backlog

Filed under: Scrum — Andrew @ 11:43 pm

I am using an open backlog on a 3 week sprint. Today I realised that there is a stage in the sprint when it’s necessary to close the backlog and complete what’s there.

With 6 days of the sprint left we only have 1 story that isn’t in progress, and someone has committed to completing that tomorrow. If, for some reason, we wanted to pull a story out of the sprint now and replace it we couldn’t recover the time we had spent on the story that was already in progress. Closing the backlog to further changes lets us focus on achieving the sprint goal.

It’s uncomfortable to say that the backlog must close. If we realise that a story no longer has any value then we shouldn’t give it any more time. One option is to drop the story, accept that we lost some time and be happy we won’t waste any more. Can we do better though?

We estimate stories using points and don’t do hourly estimates on the associated tasks. If we did hour estimates or tracked hours remaining then it might be possible to work out which stories we could move in. We would understand what time that had been spent on a story and make sure any new story would fit into the sprint.

The open backlog has been really helpful in the first 2 weeks of the sprint. If we do have to close the backlog now I think we can still be pleased with the flexibility we had until this point. Maybe the retrospective will throw up some ideas for allowing us to keep the backlog open for longer.