locking stories and features for a sprint

James Radvan

When the stakeholders have completed prioritisation of stories and assigned them to a sprint, and the team has agreed that the sprint is achievable, how is or how can the sprint be "locked down" so that stakeholders can't sneak in new stories to an in-progress sprint?

I imagine this is doable with permissions (e.g. not giving out Schedule Issues permission) but that prevents stakeholders prioritising all the time, including during sprint planning. Of course there is always the possibility that a critical bug will emerge requiring priority implementation without a full sprint restart, so it should be possible to update an in-progress sprint, but under the control of the Scrum Master.

Have I missed something in GreenHopper, or are permissions the only (system) way?

Thanks

Martin Cooper3

Greenhopper honours the underlying Jira workflow and permission scheme. It does not have any additional features around this area.

So will need to find a solution there or look to bespoke development, i'm afraid.

However, if you base the prioirtising phase on the planning board, by using the ranking field and markers, then should be able to remove the permission from the stakeholders without impact. Once the prioitising is done the 'responsible' person can drag and drop the top x issues as shown by the markers into the sprint. It just becomes a single action that the stakeholders do not need to do.

Obviously the above is very simple, and has no knowledge of your process, setup or working culture so may simply not be feasible for you. But if you use constraints and are running daily sprints you should be able to effectivley police this as would be very visible if more issues started showing up.