mediumScenarioEntryMidSenior
It is day seven of a ten-day Sprint and the team clearly will not finish everything. What do you do?
4 min readUpdated 2026-08-15
Answer
Short answer
Make the shortfall visible today, then have the Developers and Product Owner renegotiate scope against the Sprint Goal, which is the commitment while the item list is not.
A mid-sprint change is not automatically wrong, but it must be handled explicitly. The right response to a mid-sprint change is to inspect whether the Sprint Goal still makes sense, make the trade-off visible, and decide what leaves if something enters. A weak answer accepts the mid-sprint change quietly and still reports the original sprint as green.
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Likely follow-ups
- The Product Owner is unavailable for the rest of the week. What do you do?
- Two items are each seventy per cent complete. How do you choose?
- How does this change your Sprint Planning next time, if at all?
- The shortfall is caused by a production incident that took three days. Is that a planning failure?
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