'Question on sprint blocker and scope change
I've had three items assigned to me for the current sprint, two of them categorized as "blockers." The third item, in 'done status,' had a requirement change today.
I checked on what "blockers" mean, and they are things preventing you from getting a task done, right? So how can a goal itself be a blocker?
Also, I've been forced to do a lot of context-switching this week in the past. This is due to support for a couple of projects. However, it keeps me from settling into the blocker tasks.
By the way, I did get one blocker task reclassified as "major" due to effectively going over the Scrum Master's head. However, it was a non-customer-facing pilot project that I had been pulled into a call on. So both of the blockers came about this way.
The third project had a scope change due to a bug discovered (not my code), which affected me.
I'm not clear how to handle all this. Any ideas?
Solution 1:[1]
The word 'blocker' does sometimes get used as a way to describe a very high priority task.
e.g. This ticket is a blocker for another team, so we must get it urgently fixed.
I agree this can be confusing!
Solution 2:[2]
When a task (Task_1) is a 'blocker', it means that without solving it, another task (Task_2) in the team cannot be completed.. so 'blocker' tasks usually have a high priority.
So you can imagine both tasks have to be done in series, like in an Airflow DAG:
Task_1 >> Task_2
Sources
This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Source: Stack Overflow
| Solution | Source |
|---|---|
| Solution 1 | Barnaby Golden |
| Solution 2 | Mich Heng |