Dealing with Scope Creep and Time Tracking

Question

We are working with two week sprints in a Scrum board and recently had a situation come up where one of my developers uncovered a chunk of work that wasn't originally considered during sprint planning on Task 1 - in theory shouldn't have affected his original story.

Trying to determine the best approach on adding this task 2 in, which will take about 20 hours, while reserving our reports. Would love to be able to show the work done during this sprint on Task 1 even though now it will not be completed until the next sprint.  Task 1 will have to be paused until Task 2 is complete.

Brittany Funk · Answer

Thank you for your reply! This actually makes the most sense and I think it would solve the need for having reports show what happened a bit more accurately.

Kevin Bui · Answer

Hi @Brittany Funk - there are a few different ways you could approach this. What I would consider is breaking the Task 1 down into smaller tasks - let's call these Task A and Task B.

So the component that was finished would be Task A, and this can be moved to Done. The component that is blocked would be Task B. And then you have Task 2, which is the work that wasn't originally considered.

And for good measure, you could then add an issue link to indicate that Task B is being blocked by Task 2.

Hope that helps! It's hard to say for sure without knowing the nature of the work, or the dynamics of your team - but hopefully I've given you something to consider.