Hi Kamlesh,
The story can’t go back to the sandbox nor the icebox :
– The sandbox is the place where ideas are suggested, waiting to be discussed and moved to a relevant “box” (backlog, features, icebox) or deleted. Here the story has gone far from that initial state.
– The icebox is where you store items that provide value so they should not be deleted but they don’t belong to the backlog because they don’t follow the current vision (out of scope but interesting items). Again the story has gone far from that initial state.
Now, only the next sprint and the backlog remain:
– backlog: It should have a top priority and a low estimate that corresponds to the remaining effort (the deployment). There is a practical problem in moving it back to the backlog in iceScrum: you will lose the tasks because tasks can only be associated to a sprint (this limitation will be removed in the next iceScrum release).
– next sprint: this is the preferred solution because it is the standard way to manage a story that has been worked on but that is not done. I consider that business approval is part of the work that makes a story complete, just as technical tasks. If a technical task is not done when closing the sprint then the story is shifted to the next sprint, I don’t see how this cannot apply for a missing business task. In this case the story will “pollute” the next sprints and that I think that this is a good thing because it should be made visible as an anomaly rather than hidden under the carpet.
In both cases this should remain an exception or it will soon become unmanageable and remove all the benefits brought by Scrum and its workflow.
The Product Owner’s role has been created to prevent such situations: she is available for the team (at least for planning sessions, questions and the sprint reviews) and she must be able to make business decisions such as approving a story in the name of business people, stakeholders, users etc.. Business approval is intended to be completed in the same sprint as the technical tasks, at any time during the sprint as soon as all its technical tasks are done or during the sprint review otherwise.
