Using story points at sub-tasks level to identify the team sprint velocity

[Sharad Singh]

Hi,

We are in the process of implementing the agile/scrum for the education development team. We have 3 weeks sprint cycle. The instructor designers develop training assets and these assets take more than one sprint to complete.

We are estimating the stories using story points at the story level, however, there are a few challenges we are facing with this approach.

• As the team is unable to complete the story in a single sprint cycle therefore at the end of the sprint, we can't identify team velocity for the specific sprint.
• The story represents a request for a single training course that can be broken into lessons or learning objectives but it doesn't make sense to create a story for each lesson/learning objective. Also, the course request can be broken into lessons post-planning phase only and that is the part of the development phase.
• Also, we are using an iterative approach to develop the story (training course), therefore the first iteration can be only three lessons, the second iteration can be the next three lessons, and so on. The iterations are also captured as a part of the sub-task. Iterations can also be identified after the planning and analysis phases.
• There are pre-defined sub-tasks that the team uses to track the progress. Each sub-task represents a development stage.
• If the team starts to estimate the sub-task using story points, I think, we should be able to see the team velocity for the sprint based on the sub-tasks completed in the sprint.  

I know that we should not do the story point estimate at a sub-task level as it is not recommended, however, I am looking for any other innovative approach or solution to resolve this issue.

Thanks in advance. 

Regards

Sharad Singh

[Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_]

Hi @Sharad Singh 

As you already figured it out that Jira Software reports will work at story level for story points, so I can suggest two options.

- If you really want to use story points at sub-tasks level then use a reporting app like eazyBI to create your own velocity chart report.

The above approach will work but might cause confusion among users unless you tell them not to use native Jira reports like Burn down or velocity chart.

- You can still use story points and time in your issues. May be that is going to give you better picture.

Though I would still say that if users are not able to finish stories then it seems like your stories are too big. May be break them further. Are you using Epics?

Ravi