Our development team estimates that they can complete 30 story points in the current iteration. Partway through the sprint they realize that they will complete 50 story points at their current rate. What we should do?
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1Meaning the stories are each worth more points of effort than expected, or the team is going to meet the Sprint Goal early and wants to know what to do next? Or something altogether different?– Todd A. Jacobs ♦Nov 26, 2018 at 13:40
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3Important: Do you have a Sprint Goal?– SarovNov 26, 2018 at 14:02
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6 Answers
Great question, and a great problem to have :)
If a team is ahead of schedule, it's still ultimately up to them as to how to manage their work. I suggest asking them what their stretch goal should be relative to the next highest-value yielding work in the product backlog, all while providing transparency to the PO. There's nothing that says you can't deliver more value than you initially anticipated.
Also congrats to your team!
What a wonderful problem to have - to be ahead of schedule.
Besides for trying to get ahead on future tasks, I would suggest the following:
- Code reviews
- Adding comments to the code
- Updating specs to match to match the code
- Blackbox and whitebox testing of code
- Some fun activity; otherwise you may essentially be punishing the team for doing a great job by giving them more work to do.
answered Nov 27, 2018 at 12:31
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3Disagree. If the code needs reviewing, commenting, documenting or testing then it's not yet done. These are not optional things that you do if you 'finish' early. (Yes, depends on your definition of 'done' but I believe these would be in most people's definition).– peeebeeeNov 28, 2018 at 15:29
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1@peeebeee - can I come work at your company which works on utopian standards/? Please? Pretty please....? I've never seen such standards implemented - not even by a far stretch. Nov 29, 2018 at 9:33
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2Heh, doesn't always work that way here either, but I think my advice is good generally - don't plan for those activities only to happen if you finish a sprint early.– peeebeeeNov 29, 2018 at 11:58
If the Product Owner is doing their job then there should be some more stories ready to go in the Product Backlog - get stuck in to the highest priority one(s) that will fit in the remainder of the sprint.
If it is frequent then it is the major concern. In retrospective meeting you should discuss this point with team and find proper action items.
Why? Because you are not properly utilizing the team or doing wrong estimation of the user stories. So consider the team capacity.
If it is once in a while or first time. You can get more user stories from backlog for the development or groom the backlog/ epic/ user stories, mostly needs confirmation from PO.
Also you can do research development task for future sprints.
I've actually had this occur on a few occasions. I let the development team pick and choose issues from the upcoming sprint to either incorporate into the current sprint (time permitting) or get a head start on the next sprint. It seems to work really well.
If this happens a lot, the capacity of the team might be exceeding the story points being allocated to the sprints. The obvious remedy here is to start either allocating more story points or readjust how the story points are assigned to issues.
I'm wondering: 1. How good is their story point estimates? Are they awarding too many story points for too little work? 2. Is this a trend? That is has this happened in previous sprints? If so...see #1 above.
