#6 Stories Not Being Completed Within A Sprint

Symptom: Some stories on the sprint backlog take a long time and do not get completed within a sprint.

Probable Cause: The granularity of a story or the detail level of the objective to be achieved could be too high.

Suggested Resolution: It takes a while for many teams to really tune in to what is the right level of granularity for a story and discover how to break stories into smaller ones. Try to set yourself a story point limit for a sprint, i.e. if a story is estimated at 13 story points for example and 8 story points is your limit, then look to break it down into smaller minimum marketable features or deliverables.

Sometimes for new areas of little knowledge it is a good idea to break a story into an investigation story to get more information, which will help with estimating, and an implementation story to do the work. Both of which may not necessarily be in the same sprint.

What you are really looking for is a story that can be achieved within the sprint, and it is good practice to keep this in mind when estimating stories and looking for when to break them down.

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