Is it possible to shuffle sprint team members in between a sprint?

Of course it is possible!! You should never be so subservient to a methodology that you allow it to stop you doing things that you know that you need to do.

What are the potential drawbacks of doing this?

The obvious drawback is that the people who are moved around end up working on a different part of the problem. They may need to acquire the domain and technology-base knowledge they didn’t need to have before the shuffle. They will definitely need to acquire understanding of parts of the codebase that they didn’t previously. These overheads will tend to make reduce “agility” … in the normal sense of that word.

But if there is an overwhelming reason to shuffle the team, you may just have to wear that (hypothetical) loss of efficiency / agility. If you have people who can’t cope with certain tasks, or can’t work together, a well executed shuffle could get back that lost efficiency … and some more.

Well, the simple answer is, yes it’s possible, but there is a good chance doing so will affect the completion of the sprints tasks.

It depends on the reason for the changes however.

If some outside factor (absence, employee leaving company/project at short notice etc), then there is only so much you can do to mitigate this.

If it is a re-prioritization of tasks mid-sprint, ideally you don’t want this to happen mid-sprint, but with agile, you are supposed to be able to deal with this a little better, although it’s not ideal.

One of the core concepts of Scrum Agile is timeboxing and that means basically a fixed period of time for what I call focused activity. This focused activity would at it’s base be the sprint you are in.

Given that, I always found the biggest drawback is a loss of focus when changing sprint team members during a sprint. The loss of focus means a loss of work and team velocity. The only times I have done this where it worked was because of a particularly bad team member or an emergency situation where a team member was out sick but the work they were on that sprint was higher priority than other teams.

What is more interesting as a question is to ask “why” you are considering moving team members around. Usually this is an indicator of a bigger problem and, as you mentioned, a situation as risen. If you must move team members around note the loss of focus which also means a loss of work and try to solve for the problem that came up initially to prevent it from happening again.

Man, if you let a methodology block your project management skills you are misunderstanding the spirit of a methodology… It is there to help, to let you focus on the important and let the repeatable stuff be done without thinking.

Of course you should move those members from the team!