Dealing with Unfinished Work
Why unfinished work happens
As you close out your iteration (or perhaps part-way through), you may find that you did not complete all of the work that you committed to. This can happen for a variety of reasons:
You overestimated what you could complete in the iteration
New teams that are still understanding their velocity may struggle with incomplete work for a few iterations until they catch their stride. This is normal. Teams should continuously adjust their planned velocity for new iterations until unfinished work becomes the exception rather than the rule.
One of your work items ended up much larger than you anticipated
At one point or another, all teams will encounter a work item that greatly surpasses its initial estimation, pushing out other work. If this becomes a common occurrence, the team should consider two preventative measures:
- Spending more time discussing, estimating, and tasking out user stories during iteration planning
- Rigorously breaking down larger user stories into smaller value-add stories.
A work item became blocked
Sometimes blockages can be avoided and other times they cannot. Always include blocked items as part of your iteration retrospective so that you have an opportunity to improve your process and communication for the next iteration.
3 Steps for dealing with unfinished user stories
Regardless of the reason, when a user story cannot be finished during an iteration, you need to deal with the situation. For each incomplete user story, you’ll want to work with your team to:
- Understand the root cause and how to avoid it next time around
- Discuss the future of the user story:
- Is it still a priority to work on this user story?
- Do we want to take a different approach this time?
- What work is remaining?
- Can we break this story down any further to reduce risk?
- Use the split feature to split out the remaining work into the next iteration (or your backlog).