What to do with unfinished stories

By | November 8, 2020

You are at the end of the sprint and you have unfinished stuff left on your sprint board. Now what?

So you will end up here from time to time. Most of the time there shouldn’t be that much left on your board, but you might have added new stuff to the board because things went on to smoothly. Or maybe you couldn’t break down your stories into small, independent and valuable stories. And I do admit that the latter is tricky. Something small and independent that delivers value. Usually the value part becomes complicated once you decide to split your stories. If feature A consist of parts 1, 2, 3 and 4, then shouldn’t we have to deliver 1, 2, 3 and 4 before considering the feature done and value gained? Maybe, or maybe not. In my team we have decided to always consider collecting value of what we have done continously. If we work on a story with Story Point 13. That is a rather complex one. Then, we might, even if we are not done with the story, decide to collect value for any job done this far. This might be gaining knowledge of something, maybe we had a lot of Unknown-Unknowns or Known-Unknowns. Just learning something might bring us closer to Done and we can then collect the value by reestimating the story with the gained knowledge. Learning something should be rewarded right?

This can be done at the daily standup, or at the end of the sprint. For the sake of progress and transparency to the PO, do it during the daily standup.