You are leading an agile transformation for a product team that has just completed their third sprint. The Definition of Done (DoD) requires automated testing, code review, and deployment to staging environment. During sprint planning, the team consistently over-commits because they estimate story points based on development effort only, not accounting for DoD activities. As a result, several stories are left incomplete each sprint, with testing and code review pushed to the next sprint. Technical debt is accumulating, and the product owner is frustrated with low velocity. What is the BEST approach to address this situation?

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Accepted Answer

The correct answer is B. Option B is correct because it addresses the root cause—the team's estimation and planning process doesn't account for all work required to meet their DoD. In agile, estimates should reflect complete, done work including all quality activities (ECO Process Task 2.5). Coaching the team to make realistic commitments builds sustainable pace and prevents technical debt. Option A is the main distractor because lowering quality standards to improve velocity metrics is counterproductive—it increases technical debt, future rework, and doesn't solve the estimation problem. Options C creates mini-waterfalls and violates the agile principle of delivering working software each sprint. Option D is superficial metric manipulation that doesn't fix the underlying planning dysfunction or improve actual delivery capability.

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