Story Points - Split Them or Move Them?

Our Agile project management tool at Yahara Software is currently TargetProcess – it’s a really nice, powerful and intuitive product.  It has a feature for closing out Sprints that allows two options:

  1. Finish using Split
    1. Open stories that have some work logged against them (in the form of completed tasks) are closed
    2. A new “Split” story is created in the next Sprint, and unfinished tasks are moved to the new story
    3. The points are then adjusted and awarded based on the percentage of work complete.  For example, if a 20 point story had four 8-hour tasks, and three were completed, on Split, a new story would be created with the one remaining task and a point estimate of 5, and the team would be awarded 15 points for the completed work
  2. Finish using Move
    1. All incomplete stories are moved, point estimates intact, to the next sprint
    2. No points are awarded to the team unless the story was 100% complete

There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these approaches.

  • Splitting Stories:
    • Pro:
      • Velocity is more accurate/granular on a sprint-by-sprint basis, since a large story that is 90% done gets the 90% recognized
  • Con:
    • Team is not encouraged to finish stories completely
    • “Remainder” split stories that have very few points for tasks like documentation can have a tendency to be pushed to the bottom of the priority list, so they may not get done
    • Moving Stories:
      • Pro:
        • The team is highly motivated to finish stories 100%
        • The team may come together and help each other out to get stories done, pitching in on unit testing and other tasks, which encourages team unity and collective ownership of code
  • Con:
    • If a team ends up moving a lot of stories, their velocity will vary widely from sprint to sprint.  This will average out over the course of several Sprints, but may make the burndown look odd
    • This approach may cause logistical issues when reporting time, since hours won’t be recognized until the story is complete

As with pretty much any process-related decision, each team needs to decide which approach it wants to take.

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