Handling incomplete items from Sprint to Sprint

Overview

How should items be handled when they aren't completed within a sprint?

We have a very specific and relatively low touch way to handle this that works very well.

Because you want to track effort within a sprint, you want to document the work that was completed in first sprint versus the second sprint.

To do this, you can split the story, effectively letting you divide the work between two user stories that both roll up to the same epic/feature or whatever the parent is.

The direct steps to this In DevStride are:

1. Enter your actual time committed within this sprint in Story 1.
2. Duplicate the Story using the duplicate item button or edit menu to create a cloned Story 2.
3. (Optionally) Tag Story 1 as “Incomplete” or whatever word works for you.
4. (Optimally) go to relationships and make story 1 either “related to” or “A dependency of” Story 2 for your use case.
5. Mark Story 1 as “Done”. This now easily pulls on reports as Done -> incomplete and you can start looking for patterns here.
6. Estimate the remaining work in Story 2.
7. Continue working in Story 2 and track the remaining time and activity there.

To make this a little easier to spot in reports, here at DevStride, we also add (Part 1), (Part 2), and (heaven forbid!) (Part 3) to the end of the story title so it’s easy to see in a list later.

The entire process takes 20 seconds or less and you get perfect reporting!