What Actually Happened
⚠ Friction Point: Cross-Team Dependency Surfaced Late
MCM-111 (book/reschedule/cancel appointment) sat blocked in "In Progress" for most of Sprint 2, waiting on Anchor's availability engine (MCM-160) to be code-reviewed and merged. The dependency itself wasn't a surprise — it was known at Sprint Planning — but the team didn't flag it as an active risk again until Day 6's standup, by which point it was creating real pressure against the Sprint Review date.
Root cause discussion: the team agreed the dependency was tracked in Jira as a linked issue, but nobody was explicitly watching it day-to-day since it "belonged" to Anchor. By the time K. Alvarez raised it at standup, there were only 4 days left in the sprint to resolve it.
What actually saved the sprint: once raised, D. Whitfield escalated directly to A. Singh the same day rather than waiting for the scheduled Scrum-of-Scrums, and the blocking review was completed that afternoon. The story still finished on time, but the team agreed this worked more due to fast informal escalation than a process that reliably catches this earlier.
Start / Stop / Continue
Start
- Explicitly calling out cross-team dependency stories at Sprint Planning with an owner responsible for actively watching them, not just linking the Jira issue
- A standing "dependencies" agenda item at every Scrum-of-Scrums, even when nothing seems at risk
Stop
- Treating a linked dependency as "tracked" just because it exists in the tool — it needs an owner checking on it, not just a link
Continue
- Direct same-day escalation between engineering leads once a blocker is actually raised — this worked well and should stay the norm, not the exception
- QA raising downstream testing-bottleneck risk early (N. Osei's Day 6 flag was useful signal)
Action Items
| Action | Owner | Due | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Add "dependency owner" field to any story flagged as cross-team at Sprint Planning | J. Marsh / R. Okafor | Sprint 3 Planning | Done |
| Add standing "Dependencies" agenda item to Scrum-of-Scrums | C. Tyrrell | Sprint 3, Day 1 | Done |
| Revisit whether this reduced late-sprint dependency surprises at the Sprint 3 retro | J. Marsh | End of Sprint 3 | Done — confirmed improvement, see Sprint 3 Planning notes |