How to work unestimatable tasks into a scrum sprint?
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
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.