-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 6
Blockers
A blocker is anything that is hindering you from completing one of your tasks. For developers this can be something like a missing API required from an external team, lack of key details in a user story that prevents full understanding of what needs to be accomplished, or other such things. For QE, this is typically lack of information that hinders the development of tests (or test plans), or a piece of functionality that is misbehaving and causing test automation to fail in a way that prevents numerous other tests from running.
If you find yourself blocked on a task, it is critical that you raise awareness of the issue so you can get help in a timely fashion.
For blockers that aren’t quickly resolvable or any blocker that involves working across groups (conductor & image_factory integration for example), please add a task to the ‘Sprint Impediments’ story and call out this issue by Task number in the next daily scrum meeting. The scrum masters are responsible for clearing blockers by working with external teams or by finding the best team members to help find a resolution.
When a task you are responsible for has been marked as blocked, it is typically most productive to move on to other tasks until your blocker is resolved. In some cases your continued participation will be requested. In either case, please be flexible and patient while the blocker is being resolved.
The scrum masters will work with team members, management, and product owners to identify the most appropriate solution to each blocker. In many cases a long term blocker will require reordering of task priority and general team flexibility. Every reasonable attempt will be made to minimize churn within a sprint, but occasionally direction will be updated mid-sprint. If you are asked to help with a blocker or believe you are the best candidate to remove a blocker please jump in and help your team mates.
In some cases, there is no feasible solution to a blocker that can be effective within the sprint time box. In these cases, the scrum masters will be responsible for ensuring an adequate level of documentation and a longer term strategy. In these cases, the blocked story may be moved out of the current sprint backlog into the product backlog and potentially reordered by the product owners for inclusion in a future sprint.
Regardless of the outcome, once a blocker is identified as a Sprint Impediment it has the same states as any other task within the sprint and is tracked/resolved in the same way.