How can you handle changes in user stories during a sprint?

You can't, everyone has to panic and jump overboard, it's the end of the world, how will the PM possibly explain this to the PMO

The 3 Cs of a user story - Card, Conversation and Confirmation introduced by Ron Jefferies in 2001 for Extreme Programming (XP) help to answer this. The card is the placeholder to capture the conversation. The confirmation or acceptance is based on criteria written on the card. Often, as we start to create something, we start to see that it will or won't meet that criteria, and the team can start to negotiate and split the story. They start to change what the story is. The conversation is the point of the user story. During the conversation, of course, things will change because we start to learn more. Change is part of "being agile". If you cannot deal with changes to user stories, maybe you aren't as agile as you think.

If the story hasn’t been picket up yet you talk to those devs who are most familiar with the context and solution (potentially the whole team if you have no clue) and run the changes past them to find out if the change would affect the estimated points. If not, go ahead change it and let the whole team know that you’ve made those changes, why and also why effort should be similar. If this story becomes much bigger then set up a very quick call to revisit the estimation and all of this story. If the story has already been picket up, call/slack the dev and discuss what the change would mean. Just be pragmatic and sensible. If it’s too late and there is still value w/o the change, add the change as a separate story on top later on….

Since changes in user stories during a sprint are a natural phenomenon, teams should continously inspect and adapt their response to it in order to optimize for building and increment meeting the definition of done and contributing to achieving sprint goal. Refinements, splitting, substitution, etc., could be considered when dealing with a change during a sprint.

Good user stories should be solution agnostic. If user stories include technical and implementation details, this increases their scope for change. Excessive change at this level is normally traceable back to issues in requirements elicitation and validation.

To manage changes in user stories during a sprint in agile development, establish a change request process, maintain clear communication, and assess the impact on current work. Involve the team, set time limits for changes, and continuously improve processes. Balancing adaptability and sprint goals is key.

Agile doesn't say to prevent changes during a sprint. Scrum has some guidelines about this, but that doesn't mean you should prevent them. Change is part of everything we do. Accept it. The key Agile practice is to understand the consequences of actions. If you need to change the story what does that mean - will things take longer, will it be harder to test, will it not meet the acceptance criteria, etc. Then as a team work out the best way to deal with it and make sure those accepting the work are informed and understand what is going on early and often. #NoSuprises

It’s not a straightforward answer because it depends on the context. For example: 1) If the user story is older than X months, it’s better to review if it’s still aligned with the situation with which the application has evolved in the past sprints before you add it to your next sprint. 2) Another consideration is to have the user stories’ estimation between 5 to max 8 man-days as if it’s that short to develop then most probably all is clear and nothing should change (again not always, as we all know). 3) Do not skip the effort of defining acceptance criteria. Last but not least, and it goes without saying, learn from every sprint and improve your user stories description and estimation.

Agile is all about handling frequent requirements or scope changes during project execution. If there comes a scenario of change in requirements while already working on the current sprint then the best action would be to follow the integrated change control process and forward it to CCB i.e. change control board for the approval and also document the overall impact as the schedule is going to be impacted and should be highlighted to the key stakeholders and get it approved before execution.

We usually agree on some hygiene rules. Prepare and fix the user stories with the highest value and priority before the sprint and once they are accepted for the sprint, they cannot be changed - full stop. It is helpful to define for each user story the same maturity workflow which also shows to the team in which state a certain user story is. Some here talk about a change request process - which sounds a bit like waterfall and not like agile - but a workflow which manages the maturity of a story is recommended

Be transparent and understand what the changes mean to the delivery of the solution. Compromising performance and quality is okay - we call that technical debt. But, as with any debt, we need to understand the repayment schedule and interest. If you are compromising, you decide not to do something, so when will it be done? What are the implications of not doing it now? Who needs to know? Have you captured the reasons for the compromise? How will you take these reasons and implications into your retrospective so that you can limit impact on future work?

The whole purpose of using Agile is to deliver value to your customers. If the changes, help you achieve the goal, then definitely we need to consider them. There are certain aspects that need to be taken care of though. The first one is to inform the team of the change as soon as possible, this helps them analyze it. The analysis would help them understand the complexity of the change, which in turn would help to identify if the change can be incorporated in the same sprint, or needs a separate story that needs refinement in the next session. Once these aspects are taken care of, it is necessary to communicate these timelines and their impact to the customers as well.

Consider also dependencies to other developers or teams. Will your scope change have limited impact or will it disturb a whole chain of events? Reorganizing might require significant coordination efforts - decision should be based on added value and urgency.