How to measure progress and handle charts for our unique team situation

Question

Hi there,

Brand new Scrum Master in Jira here. Migrated from Asana to Jira a couple of weeks back.

We are a startup and the product team consists of FE, BE, Data Science, Platform, Devices, QA and DEsign teams. We work on 2 week sprints.

When we start working on an epic, we generally start with reseach tickets, implementaion and then it goes into QA. Sometime the tickets take 2-4 weeks in the research / implentation  stage, thus it wont move to done.

In jira, burn down chart starts moving only when the tickets / tasks are 'Done'. This makes it difficult to calculate team velocity.

What should i do differently to handle this situation, so that as a team we can track the progress and team velocity (even via burn down chart to start with will be enough)

TIA

Lakshmi

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

If the estimated work for an issue is longer than the length of your sprint, then I think you have three choices:

1. You accept the current state where there is no burn down progress until 2 or 3 sprints down the road when the research is finally completed.

2. Make your sprints long enough to encompass completion of these tasks.

3. Break the stories for the longer running task into smaller increments that can show progress is being made. Can you identify smaller increments of work (for research and implementation) that can be completed within the time frame of your sprint?