Why Do User Stories Sometimes Remain Unfinished At The End Of A Sprint? What Steps Can You Take To Correct The Problem?

The scrum manifesto greatly emphasis upon the successful completion of the tasks included in the sprint backlog during the sprint activity. The sprint planning meeting is specially conducted to ensure that the correct number of user stories are included in the sprint backlog, and that the development team can cater to them in a successful manner. One of the most important rules in scrum methodology is that all user stories taken up for development purposes should be successfully completed during the sprint. It is possible to achieve positive results only when this happens. However, in practice, many a times, the team fails to exhaust the user stories at the end of the sprint. Some of the tasks remain unfinished. As per the norm, uncompleted user stories ought to be transferred back to the product backlog. In majority of the cases, when scrum is implemented, the product owner reconsiders the unfinished user stories for development purposes. The question is why does this occur? Why do user stories remain incomplete at the end of the sprint?

Causes of incomplete user stories and development tasks 
In real life, things can go wrong if there are reasons for them to do so. In scrum and sprinting, the rules are not any different as to how and why things should go wrong. However, on the basis of experience, the factors which can commonly hamper the results of a particular sprint can be summarized as:

• A team member fails to show up for work owning to health related problems. The development work keeps on piling up for the number of days the particular member remains absent. Eventually, it becomes impossible to complete the tasks in time because the task list has not been processed for development on a daily basis.
• The user story turns out to be more complicated than initially thought of, and the development takes more time. This can create disastrous results in the future, because the error is due to improper planning owing to a lack of experience or foresight on the part of the product manager or the team members. The error occurs because the problem has not been envisioned properly, or anticipated, and is because of human error.   

It is important to correct the problems well in time before they can affect the productivity of the project. The basic purpose of scrum is to adapt to changing development requirements, and the scrum framework has been specifically created to satisfy this requirement through the proper implementation of scrum rules. If the project fails to deliver the results, it is not because the framework is wrong or ineffective, rather the scrum master has not enforced the rules properly. Whatever the reasons may be, it is important to anticipate problems and pitfalls, and cater to them as and when they occur in a manner such that the project succeeds in processing the throughput and delivering the results.

How to ensure the user stories get completed during the sprint

It is imperative each team member, including the product owner and the scrum master learns from his or her experience. Self-learning and self-correction is an inherent feature of scrum. The framework provides special techniques which can be effectively used to ensure the user stories get developed and completed in time.

Sprint planning

The main objective of a sprint planning meeting is to evaluate which user stories should be included within the sprint backlog by the product owner. The meeting is schedules before the sprint commences, and provides an opportunity for the product owner to determine the priority of the user stories and allot them to the sprint backlog for development purposes. The product owner has to chance to confer with the scrum master, and if required take his or her advise whether the team members can complete the user stories during the sprint. The product owner has to use his or her experience in determining the capability of the team members, take into account the possible pitfalls likely to occur during the implementation of the sprint, and make preparations to deal with problems as and when they arise. Sprint planning meetings are a great way to check for anything that can go wrong with the sprint and make proper provisions for it.  

Sprint retrospectives  

The retrospective meetings are held at the end of each sprint. They provide an opportunity for the product owner and the scrum master to evaluate how the sprint has progressed, what has worked out, and what has gone wrong with the sprint. IT offers an opportunity to learn from the ongoing process. Many a times, dangerous and harmful trends are disclosed during the sprint retrospective meetings, and product owners get a chance to correct them well in advance so they don’t hamper the sprint activity. 

Find out more, and download our free QuickScrum tool which can help you in implementing scrum in an effective and profitable way!