Time at end of sprint, but I know I can't complete the next story

Alex Key

I have time available at the end of a sprint.

The next most important stories in the backlog I cannot complete within the time left, but it would make sense to take on some of the subtasks from those stories.

How would people reccomend representing these in a JIRA?

Also I read it is recomended to aim to to have a deliverable product at the end of each sprint - so should I instead take on lower priority, smaller tasks?

I understand that I could bend the rules to suite the situation, but I'm interested to see what the recommended JIRA / Scrum practices are?

Peter Van de Voorde

Hi Alex,

You have several options :

1. You could finish your sprint early and delivery the stories that are now completed.
2. You could add some sub tasks of the next story on the backlog to your current sprint, if you don't need a production ready product at the end of the sprint this should not be a problem. If you do need a production ready product you can make sure that the code is already in your deliverable but isn't being used by any functionality yet.
3. You could use the extra time in this sprint to fix some extra bugs or do some refactoring of existing code.
4. You could take a smaller backlog item of a lower priority and quickly add it to this sprint.

One of the biggest rules of Scrum is : just do what works for you.

Just pick any of the above options and you'll be fine.

My choice would be option 2 because then you are still working on the most important parts of your backlog, even if you will not finish the story in this sprint.

Best regards

Peter