if a user story becomes obsolet, what's best (done incomplete or ...) ?

Question

Condition: user story was planned to be done in the active sprint. While analyzing / working, the circumstances forces not to finish the story (wrong technical concept; business requirements changed; ...). Let's assume, it is not the teams fault, that it came to the situation. What is then best to do, specially in terms of burn down chart and velocity?

a) foresee resolution variant "cancelled" and change to status "done"? If yes, burn down moves closer to the sprint target

b) have beside "done" the status "cancelled" in the workflow. This status also has the meaning of being finished with it (and not that the story would then being forwarded to another sprint), but since there is no benefit for the product, burn down chart is untouched.

What is your experience with this situation?

thanks for feedback, Roland

Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting] · Accepted Answer

This is a pretty common challenge that many people face with Jira.  In order to provide good precision in to the state of an issue, Jira has a workflow Status and also a Resolution.  The workflow Status represents where the issue is in its lifecycle. The Resolution represents what I call "the level of fixedness." Another way to think of the Resolution is "what was done." It's important to recognize the distinction when you design your workflows.

Best practice is to drive all issues to their final workflow status ( ie: Closed, Done, etc) You won't want to have issues hanging around in other statuses forever or it causes confusion and can cause some types of reports that depend on the final workflow status to determine that an issue is done and no more work will be done on it.

In your example, my recommendation would be to design your workflow so that you move the issue to the Done workflow Status and force the user to set a Resolution of Cancelled (or similar.) You could also create a dedicated workflow transition for "Cancelled" and use a post-function to automatically set the Resolution field to Cancelled.