UserStory carryover - Is it a problem?

This article is a?series of posts?on the common and difficult challenges many professionals face while implementing?Agile. Agile is easy on process but many of us underestimate the difficulty of making it work.

Once in a while, every team will have some carryover user stories. However, if this happens frequently the value of the sprint timebox comes into question. As an SM(scrum master) your goal is this does not happen very often.?

During sprint planning, it is a good practice to identify the # of story points committed and # of story points as a stretch target. Having a stretch target will push the team's imagination for more productive and smarter ways to do things and committed story points can be used by PO(product owner) for better planning.?

Committed story points are one key metric for the PO to understand how many sprints it will take to get a feature completed. If the team's velocity is say 20 story points/sprint and the feature is 200 story points it will take 10 sprints to complete the feature.?

What if the team is missing say 5-10 story points every sprint? In this scenario, it is impossible to understand when a feature could be made available to a customer.?

The main reason for this anti-pattern is:?

1) Sprint planning is about "what"?and?"how". Maybe the team is too focused on?what?part in sprint planning and later struggles with the?how?part. User story scope and commit should be done with some high-level design( the "How") flow in mind.?

2) Add tasks to the stories in the sprint planning phase and "do it together" with the team. Doing it together helps the sprint team understand the likely effort and any optimizations if possible.?

3) Team is pulled into additional sustenance work or for side projects. If they cannot be avoided these tasks should be translated into user stories for the sprint. The team delivers the committed story point, just that, not all of them were for the same project.?

4) Reduce the sprint commitment to an average of the last 3 sprints. The team should first get to a velocity that can be committed and later try to push their boundaries.

Post 6/(30)?- "agile-twist-n-turns"

Blog site:?https://manishagarwal-agile-twist-n-turns.blogspot.com/2021?