How to capture velocity report when a story is spanning across multiple sprint?

Question

As per agile standard, though we are trying to keep the story small enough sometimes it is not possible to close the story including the testing in the same sprint due to unavoidable situation. So the story is moving to next sprint, but the issue is the effort spent on the current sprint is also moving to next sprint and it is not giving the correct velocity of the team.

Is there a way to resolve this? I am sure most of the developers are going through same kind of issues.

uttam kumar bhatta · Answer

Thanks @Trudy P Claspill for your response.

Yes, we all understand story must be small enough that can be completed within the sprint timeline including testing. However due to business urgency we have to add something inside a sprint which is causing other stories to move out though we are improving on that process not to do.

So when the situation is unavoidable how to achieve that? If we will clone a story will JIRA treat that as separate story or same story? At the end of Sprint I want to maintain unique feature list(Story) to the end user.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

In agile methodologies you don't get partial credit for work. You get credit and measure velocity only on work items that are fully completed.

What are the unavoidable circumstances? Is the work not adequately defined? Is other work taking priority? Is the scope of the sprint being changed? Is the work stuck waiting on something from an external team? Are you over estimating the team capacity?

Incomplete work is a method to highlight some other issue affecting your sprints. Address the root cause of the incomplete work rather than focusing getting credit for partial work.

Having said that, you could consider splitting the development and testing efforts into separate stories, if you want to get credit for the development effort even when the testing effort has not been completed.

I have been in organizations where they were adamant about getting partial credit. At the end of the sprint, if they had partially completed work they would

1. Clone the issue to make a new issue.

2. Adjust the story points in the original issue to reflect the actual work completed, and close that issue within the sprint.

3. Adjust the story points and description of the new issue to reflect the remaining work and assign that story to the next sprint.