My team is currently transitioning to a new, more frequent, release cadence. As part of this transition we now need to merge changes from the feature branch, where we do our development, to a Master Code Line which is also the release candidate. Currently, the work that we commit to in a sprint represents the completion of the story in the feature branch only, it does not include the additional validation that might be required in the Master Code Line. We may have a number of stories that make up a complete new feature and this work might be spread across multiple sprints, with the feature not being released for several sprints. In order to properly track our velocity we need to "Resolve" a story within the sprint - if it is not resolved, it won't count toward our completed story points. If it is "resolved" it is no longer in the back log and if it was resolved in a prior sprint there is no easy way to see it and track it. This is a problem because it has not been released yet. I would like to give stories that we complete in the sprint a custom status, like "awaiting release" then I could track them on a separate kanban board. The objection my team has though is that "awaiting release" does not then count toward their completed story points and their velocity is inaccurate. Has anyone faced a similar problem? Any clever solutions?
