What to do with a user story that was completed but not accepted?

Question

We have a user story in the sprint that was built meeting the requirements and by the time the end user reviewed, they said that's not what they wanted. The miscommunication happened between the appointed person to gather and communicate the requirement and the person writing the user story that was ultimately worked on, so the end user wants now a completely different thing.

What should be the US end status if we completed it but it was not Accepted, thus not being deployed to Prod?

Mark Segall · Accepted Answer

Hi @Ruth Jiménez and welcome to the community!  I typically mark these as closed with an appropriate resolution and create a new linked issue for the updated requirement.

Mark Segall · Accepted Answer

This is not a tool based recommendation. In my Agile training it was taught that the story is always marked as Done whether it was ultimately scrapped, incorrect, or victim of scope creep with new stories being created for corrections.

If you want to keep everything inside the original story, it's not best practice, but you could add a reopened status with the following recommendations:

* Conditional transition - You could have it where only the project lead or admins can transition to this status
* Automation - Once in this Reopen status the issue goes back to the desired state (To Do, In Progress, etc). The automation is helpful because if you want to execute queries against any issue that's been reopened, you could do this:

Status was reopened

The end result is that you could technically capture the work complete as long as it is in your Done status at the end of the sprint.  Then find the issue and reopen it before you start the next sprint so it can be counted against velocity for the next sprint.  Again, I don't recommend this route, but this is a potential path if your process is not flexible.