A valuable user story is lacking the final user interface designs, but the design team promises to deliver on day two of the upcoming Sprint. The Product Owner for your team is fine with that, and pushes to have the user story added to the Sprint Backlog. What are your thoughts on this scenario?
Whether an incomplete user story should be added to the Sprint Backlog depends upon the Developers’ present concerns and experience with the circumstances. In the case of an incomplete or missing user interface (UI) design, for example, if the design team is almost certain to deliver because they have done so in the past, and if the user story is high value, and if the story can be accomplished within the Sprint despite its UI deliverables arriving late, and if the Developers agrees to it — then an exception may be acceptable.
Beware that exceptions have a tendency to become accepted practices. An organization’s intent on being agile should not be allowed to bypass the Product Backlog refinement and Sprint Planning process. You should be aware that such situations are not tenable. Furthermore, if implementation of a work item subjected to such an exception fails, no one will bother to read the fine print and acknowledge that an exception had been made. Instead, they will most likely view the Scrum process itself as having failed.
You may either accept or reject exceptions to the process. But you should also be able to analyze situations in which exceptions have been made, and explain the collateral damage that the Scrum Team may be exposed to.
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