What Should We Do After Canceling A Sprint?!

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It is possible that sometimes you need to cancel a Sprint. 

Scrum Guide says:

A Sprint could be cancelled if the Sprint Goal becomes obsolete. Only the Product Owner has the authority to cancel the Sprint.

Another phrase is that your Sprint Goal doesn’t make sense anymore.

But why does a Sprint Goal become obsolete? There are a few reasons:

1. There can be a big change on your stakeholders’ side
2. There can be a disruptive technology change
3. There can be a fundamental change in the market trend and business conditions
4. There can be a significant shift in company strategy or priorities
5. The problem the Sprint Goal was solving no longer exists
6. There can be some force majeures

7. …

    

Imagine you are using a 3-week Sprint. After two weeks, something happens, and your Product Owner decides to cancel the Sprint. The next question is what you should do after cancelling the Sprint. Scrum Guide doesn’t say anything about it.

There are several things that you need to do:

1. Having a short announcement session: This is a short meeting by the Product Owner to inform the Developers and the Scrum Master about the decision.

    

2. Decide on the status of the PBIs in the Sprint Backlog: All Done PBIs will be added to the Increment. All undone PBIs will be returned to the Product Backlog for further consideration.

    

3. Update the Product Backlog: Product Owner should update the Product Backlog based on the reason of cancellation and reorder PBIs, making it ready for a new Sprint Planning.

    

4. Running an ad-hoc Sprint Cancellation Retrospective: It gives you a moment to do root cause analysis to understand why you had to cancel the Sprint. It gives you a lot of learning.

    

5. As a team, decide what you want to do in the remaining days of the current Sprint. You have two options:
   1. You can start a new Sprint one day after the date that you cancelled the current Sprint. In this case, it is better to have a longer Sprint to not lose the cadence of Sprinting. For the above example, your next Sprint would be 4 weeks (one week from the current cancelled Sprint + 3 weeks from a regular Sprint).
   2. Use it to improve your team and process. This is a great time to do some clean-ups, learning & development, refactoring, paying off technical debt, …

Although Scrum gives us the opportunity to cancel a Sprint, in reality, it is rare. But you should be ready and prepared for it. In my personal experience, after working in the Scrum world for 13 years, I have experienced it once in reality.

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