Cancelling a sprint in dire situation

Question

In my org, we had a disastrous outage, which resulted in little to no sprint work getting done as the teams were busy firefighting the outage issues. In this event, as product owner I am considering cancelling the sprint. Looks like I can do that by 'Deleting' the sprint. My question is once i delete the sprint ( #2 suppose ), and i create a new sprint, Will the new sprint number be #2 again ? I can then put all the issues in the deleted sprint to the new sprint.

Is there a better way of dealing with this situation that I may be missing ?

Deepanshu Natani · Answer

Hi @Tanaya Ojha

As per the Scrum Guide,

"A Sprint can be cancelled before the Sprint time-box is over. Only the Product Owner has the authority to cancel the Sprint.

A Sprint would be cancelled if the Sprint Goal becomes obsolete. This might occur if the company changes direction or if market or technology conditions change. In general, a Sprint should be cancelled if it no longer makes sense given the circumstances. But, due to the short duration of Sprints, cancellation rarely makes sense.

When a Sprint is cancelled, any completed and "Done" Product Backlog items are reviewed. If part of the work is potentially releasable, the Product Owner typically accepts it. All incomplete Product Backlog Items are re-estimated and put back on the Product Backlog. The work done on them depreciates quickly and must be frequently re-estimated.

Sprint cancellations consume resources, since everyone regroups in another Sprint Planning to start another Sprint. Sprint cancellations are often traumatic to the Scrum Team, and are very uncommon."

Now in your case, you have 2 options:

1) You can just mark the current sprint as closed/ completed and move the tasks/ issues to a new sprint. This is recommended because you will not lose any data related to current sprint plus there does not seem to be any benefit of deleting the sprint.

2) You can delete the current sprint and move the tasks/ issues to a new sprint.

Regarding sprint number, I am assuming that you are referring to "Sprint Name". You can create the new sprint with name #2 (sprint name can be edited in Jira).

Hope this answers your query.

Let me know if you have any further doubts which we can discuss.

Matt Doar_tzgiej · Answer

The sprint happened whether you were able to work on any of the issues or not. Just close the sprint and create a new one.