We can't get all Commited user stories done in this Sprint, what do we do?

While we always do our best to manage our capacity, estimates there will always be those moments when something will come up where we will not be able to complete the work we signed up for. There will also be times when we find we have under estimated the amount of work we can get done in a sprint and we will want to take on more work items.

The Scrum framework has a way for us to do this, it is called Renegotiation. Below are a few tips on how to best accomplish this;

• The team should contact the Product Owner no later than three days before the end of the sprint to move / drop / add work items.​
• The team needs to communicate out that the Sprint has been renegotiated and why. As the Scrum Master I have usually handled this for the team by editing our Sprint landing page on a SharePoint portal.
• The renegotiated items should be moved out of the sprint in your tracking tool. The tracking tool I am most familiar with is Microsoft’s TFS, but have also used other tools like Jira, etc.

While on this topic I thought I would share what we do when the team is not able to completely finish a user story. When this happens the team will follow the above steps to ensure the PO is in agreement. Then the team will need to ensure that the tasks that can't be done against a user story are handled correctly. Below is how we have handled this in the past;

• ​Clone the Sprint user story that can't be completed
• Edit the user story that is to stay in the Sprint to reflect the work that will be completed
• Edit the cloned story to reflect the work that still needs to be accomplished

Ideally the plan is to take on the cloned user story in the next sprint.