Sprint Cancellation and how to proceed
Hi Guys,
Assuming a Sprint Goal is no longer relevant/obsolete, a Sprint is cancelled after just 1 week of being into it. The Sprint is usually of 2 weeks duration. My understanding is that the next Sprint should start immediately after the terminated Sprint, however, this will affect the regular cadence that the teams are usually used to following i.e. a new Sprint starts on a Wednesday (The previous Sprint was 2 weeks long, started on a Wednesday and ended on a Tuesday).
How should teams deal with this cadence change? If we don't immediately start a Sprint following the cancellation or conclusion of a previous Sprint, does it mean that we are not following Scrum? What I am saying is, if we wait till the normal duration is over, so that we can again start on a Wednesday, does that mean we are not following Scrum? (I know its a waste of time just to align ourselves again)
If a break in cadence would cause substantial pain, why not just plan an abbreviated Sprint to encompass the one week remaining? The goal might be to extract as much value out of the work performed in the cancelled Sprint, for example.
The next Sprint should start after the closing of the previous Sprint. However, cancelling a Sprint are unusual circumstances, that require unusual ways to handle this. My best guess on why there is nothing about this in the Scrum Guide is that these are very prone to the situation.
To be more precise:
The next sprint starts immediately after the conclusion of the previous Sprint.
So in my opinion, maximize time spent on Retrospective since this is vital at this stage, start a new sprint, with a normal sprint length (no intermediate sprint to just fill the gap), start your planning for the first day(s) of work (making sure to pay special attention to the Sprint Goal), and make the work emerge organically.
I am not sure that starting a sprint of normal length after the cancellation of a sprint is the best option.
There may be an established cadence with the Scrum Team (and potentially throughout the organization), along with standing meeting schedules, that may be disrupted and create a significant amount of waste if the sprint cancellation resulted in a complete schedule and heartbeat shift (see Ian's comment re: substantial pain).