How to manage stories that won't finish in a sprint?

[Nik Hristov]

Because of the specific type of software work we do, our stories normally cannot be completed in 1 sprint.  I've seen some posts where the advice is to simply break-down the story into multiple parts, however doing that significantly complicates our board and being able to easily see and track exactly where we are on our deliverables, mostly because there is no easy way to link /  establish a relationship between the now 3 separate stories, which are all part of the same deliverable. 

We've tried using the sub-tasks, but of course this doesn't work since we can't have sub-tasks to the same story belong to 2 different sprints. 

Moving everything to a higher hierarchy level (to an Epic) also has its challenges as now every actual 'story'  becomes an 'epic' and hence ultimately having to resort again to use google sheets to keep track of our overall roadmap and the main themes. 

Is there something we are missing? Some alternative approach?

Thanks

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Nik Hristov 

Welcome to the Atlassian community!

If your work normally can't be completed within the timeframe of your sprint, then your work is too expansive or your sprint is too short.

A guiding principle of Scrum is that you plan your sprints with what you can commit to delivering by the end of the sprint.

By routinely having work that takes more than a single sprint to complete, you are missing out on many benefits of the Scrum methodology, such as measuring sprint Velocity and using that to help determine the capacity for work in sprints.

If you really can't break the stories into smaller stories that can be completed within a sprint, and you can't extend the duration of your sprints, I think bumping your "stories" up to the level of "Epic" is the way to go.

You may need to look at the third party apps that are available for extending the Jira issue hierarchy and giving you better options for visualizing the roadmap. Or upgrade to the Premium subscription that includes hierarchy extensions and Advanced Roadmaps.

[Nik Hristov]

Gotcha, thank you Trudy for the detailed response, appreciate it.