How to work unestimatable tasks into a scrum sprint? [closed]

Question

I am the scrum master for a small team of 4 developers. The project we are working on has a lot of tasks that we have never done before and cannot easily estimate in a sprint planning meeting. What is the best way for me to run a sprint with this uncertainty? I am finding it very hard to finish a sprint with a potentially releasable product. I am also finding it hard to plan sprints when there is a lot of unknown length tasks.

Answer 1

I'm not sure what the term is in Scrum, but in User Story terminology you would do a "spike", which is basically a very short period of research into the topic so that your team will be able to estimate the task at the end of the spike.

Example:

Story:

Analyst wants to be able to review financial data in pie charts.

Your team doesn't use any charting tools, so you need to know how long it would take to build something like this. Or perhaps instead, you could invest in third party tooling and integrate a tooling set with your application.

You would do a spike to research these venues and come up with estimations on them, then decide which route to take.

Answer 2

Are the "tasks" things that someone in the world has done before, or are they just new to your team. I will assume the later. If this is the case then what you are finding is that you do not have the necessary experience on your team to solve the problem. Thus you will be developing that experience as you go. All this means is that the complexity of your stories is higher. In the first couple of sprints you may score some of the stories as 13 and then later on they become 8s because you then have the knowledge you need.

You don't need to know how to do the stories to estimate them. You just need to take on less of them due to your experience gap.

I like to reserve "Spikes" (yes that is the term used in scrum) for attempting to solve business domain problems that have no known solution. Not for the team to do training.