So you’ve decided to go agile. Your team knows the terms, you have the systems set up, and you’re ready to go. But a few days into your first sprint the wheels start falling off as things change, user stories move in and out, and other rules violations occur. The referee (project manager, SCRUMmaster, etc.) is blowing the whistle constantly. What exactly are the working ground rules here?

Your particular flavor of Agile may have its own rules, but from a practical standpoint there are a few I find particularly helpful in keeping the forces of chaos at bay:

 1.  The sprint dates are fixed. They don’t slide around. You don’t get one more day. On the last day of the sprint a build with everything that’s been completed is created and you move on to the next sprint.

2.  Once the sprint starts the user stories and their priorities are fixed for the duration of the sprint. Sprints are made to be short enough that there simply is no need for changes in that short of a time period. Unless you have a ground rule that newly discovered bugs can be added to the sprint or a major initiative is cancelled by someone higher up, the user stories are the user stories. Of course, if you’ve miscalculated the velocity and run out of user stories before you run out of sprint you probably will want to start pulling in the top priorities from the backlog.

3.  At the end of the sprint, anything in process moves to the top of the priority list in the next sprint. Based on your ground rules, anything that hasn’t started might be fair game to move back into the backlog.

4.  Don’t load up multiple sprints ahead of time (that’s what the backlog is for). This just makes for a whole lot more work retooling and spreads the backlog out in multiple places so you can’t see it all at once.

5. If you didn't finish a user story and need to move it to the next sprint, your tool may or may not be able to handle the velocity implications of the move (in other words, you don't want to lose track of the time you spent on it in the previous iteration).  You may want to create an epic for the one you didn't finish and a 'continued' user story to put into the next iteration.