Extra Push for Completion

Posted by Mike on June 25, 2009

We were having our scrum yesterday and the discussion turned to three, low-hour, tasks that one particular developer has left to complete. He also has another larger task remaining to complete. His choice was to postpone the small tasks in order to complete the larger task.  It will only take a maximum of four hours to complete the small tasks.

The BA’s on our team came to me later and spoke to me why these small tasks were important.  (They weren’t sure they could speak to the impact  during the scrum.)  The accuracy of a key calculation, which is being tested right now in another system, was at stake. I requested that the developer put aside the larger task and complete the small tasks today.

As scrum master, I was acting to remove an obsticle that a different team was encountering. I also wonder what could have happened differently so that I wouldn’t have had to intervene. Could it be that with just a little extra push, the developer could have completed this task earlier so it wouldn’t have become an issue?  Could it be that the importance of this task been discovered earlier in our sprint?

What do you think?