Creating new stories for unfinished work at the end of a Sprint

At the end of a Sprint, you find that some of the stories are partially “done” and not fully “done” in terms of the Acceptance Criteria.  The team decides to remove the scope that is not completed and put the remaining scope in a new story that is added to the next Sprint and then close the story in the current Sprint.  Everyone is happy! The team is happy because they got some credit for the hard-work they put in.  The management and leadership are happy because looking at the numbers it appears like the team is making good progress.  Is this a good practice?

Here are some points that I gathered from other Scrum masters that I work with on the same project.  I will summarize my thoughts at the end of this blog.  Here are the responses from the other Scrum masters (paraphrased for correctness of grammar)

1. I have my teams just roll over unfinished work or if there is a scope change/etc. something that happens and that prevents them from completing the entire story, then we rarely but sometimes split the story by creating a new story to capture the change/unfinished work.  We document any changes in the old and new stories too.
2. Just to be fair and give some credit to the engineers, at times, I would create a new story in the following sprint only if more than 89% of the work is done and only 20% is left – like maybe review and pushing it to production.  But I do want to point out that it is not a preferred practice; but an odd ball here and there is okay  -- this is where the Scrum Master makes a judgement call, whether the team is misusing this or being respectful and learning from this.   Sometimes there are some unforeseen circumstances (not the engineer’s fault or lack of responsibility) due to which part of a story does not get completed.  If this becomes a regular practice, I would definitely stay away from giving partial credit.  I have always believed in adopting any practice that makes your team efficient and happy while staying within Agile boundaries.
3. While I agree with your question (paraphrased – “should we let stories be rolled over or split them?”) and thought process, here’s how I am thinking.
   1. People over process
   2. Do whatever it takes to get the work done
   3. Build consensus and make decisions quickly
   4. Key – as Agile Delivery Leads, we keep the lessons learned on “top of mind”

Here are my thoughts on this topic:

1. It is not a good practice to split stories simply because some of the work was not completed and then carry over the work that is not completed to the next Sprint in a new Story.
2. Splitting stories because the work is not completed defeats the purpose of a Sprint.  The team needs to make every effort to completed the story in the Sprint and I have noticed that 80% of the work is frequently done in the last few days of the Sprint.  If the team realizes that there is no real consequence for not completing the work on a Sprint boundary, it is unlikely that the team will make this extra effort to complete the work.
3. The other problem with splitting the work that is not completed into a new story is that people may not plan accurately.  They will overload the Sprint and then simply split the stories and carry over the work that is not done into new stories for the next Sprint.  This seems like a convenient back door solution for bad planning
4. I do agree that if there is scope creep into a story, then the new scope that has been added may be moved into another story and the new story moved to the next Sprint. Scope creeping into an existing story is in itself a bad practice.  If we have addition scope due to changes that come from Business, then we can always create a new story to address that additional scope.
5. Oftentimes, the team wants to get partial credit for the work that they have done.  From my point of view there is no such thing as partial credit.  We should also keep in mind that all credit goes to the team and not to the person that is working on a story.  Also, the only time the points or credit in a story are relevant is when we are measuring velocity of a Sprint.  The velocity of a Sprint is a moving average of at least 3 Sprints and hence it doesn’t matter if the points in a story were not counted in the current Sprint.