Mar
10
A common fear about agile is that it makes the job of managing scope difficult for your project. This can be true, however, a golden rule of agile software development is that the scope of each iteration or sprint must be completely locked-down once it begins. This means no new requirements, no swapping of requirements and also no shifting of the end date.
Allowing a new requirement into the current sprint may increase the satisfaction of the business in the short term, however, there are many serious longer term implications. The most serious concern is that the business or product owner will not take the process of preparing requirements prior to the sprint seriously and will always feel that things can be “snuck in” if they haven’t done a thorough job of preparing and prioritising requirements.
Another concern is that the team will lose focus and their sense of commitment about what they agreed to deliver. This is a quick way for the “self managing” team to lose their sense of responsibility.
This is always tricky and requires a high degree of diplomacy, however, the best way to deal with this situation is to push back on the customer and let them know that it will be the first requirement to be included in the next sprint. If this is still not appropriate, simply stop the current sprint and plan out a new one with the new requirement included.
