It happens to the best of teams: good efforts were spent during the iteration toward completing all the tasks (and tests!) associated with a story, but one way or another, not everything was completed on time for the Review. So, now what?
In the Review > Close Sprint stage, the Split process allows for an accurate reflection of the work that was actually performed within a given iteration while giving you the freedom to determine if any credit (i.e. feature estimate) has been earned by the partially completed feature. The Split takes the portion of work that is complete and leaves it in the current iteration, and takes the work that remains and moves that to the next iteration under a newly-created story. The following applies to the tasks (or tests) associated with the story being split; if a task is:
- Completed (i.e. To Do of 0) – these are left intact with the story in the existing iteration
- Not Started (i.e. Done of 0) – these are moved forward to the new iteration
- Partially Completed (i.e. some Done and some To Do) – these will exist in both the new and old iterations. The one in the old iteration will have a To Do value of 0 and all the Done amount left there. The one in the new iteration will have the remaining To Do amount.
After you perform a Split…
- The Story and corresponding tasks/tests are automatically moved to the next iteration – you do not need to edit this manually;
- You can edit the Detail Estimate and To Do amounts for the remaining workload from the Split screen directly, or leave them as-is for further editing during your next iteration Planning session.
So let’s keep moving along, tracking the story to completion!