agile on the beach: the art of slicing and dicing user stories

THE ART OF SLICING AND DICING USER STORIES

Rachel Davies & Mike Rawling @unrulymedia

You’ll be trying this out! WORKSHOP ALERT

WHAT IS A USER STORY?

A user story is a short description of a system feature that is:

“…understandable to customers and developers, testable, valuable to the customer and small enough so that the programmers can build half a dozen in an iteration.”

Kent Beck, 2001

STRIKING A BALANCE THE HARD PART

Needs Options

Business Development

Value

SHARED RESPONSIBILITY

Consumable Vertical Slices

BENEFITS OF SPLITTING

Small stories are:

•  Better understood

•  Get delivered more quickly

•  .. ?

HOW DO WE SLICE?

VALUE CONVERSATION

Before investing time in development we need to understand where the value comes from.

 Who knows about the business case?

 Any differences between user communities?

 What are USPs? (the Unique Selling Points)

 Are there different user perspectives?

COST CONVERSATIONS

Development is usually the main cost.

We should also consider:

 Ongoing operational costs

 Check US and EMEA differences

 Anyone else outside development impacted by this story? Eg Design, Infra

DTSTTCPW

Do the simplest thing that can possibly work!

  Slice the story into end-to-end deliverable chunks that allow us to deliver some value

  Sometimes value is learning whether idea is valuable.

HOW TO SPLIT

 What does a user see?

What information is essential?

 What can a user do?

What behaviours does the system have?

 What safety needs to be considered?

Failure cases

 What platforms is this supported on?

THINK ABOUT

 What types of users are there for this system?

 What are the benefits for each type of user?

 What might be the challenges for different types of user?

 Will user needs change as time passes?

 What might be difficult/expensive to implement?

The smallest slice is a test

TESTABLE BEHAVIOUR

DIALS

SAFETY

USER SUPPORT

SLICK

REALITY

PRACTICAL

GROUPWORK

 Get into groups of 2-3 people

 Grab some index cards

 Consider this epic story

 Write 1 smaller story per card

 Objective: generate as many small story cards out of this single story

  Share one small story with the group at the end

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LINKS •  Story Maps Jeff Patton 

http://www.agileproductdesign.com/blog/the_new_backlog.html •  Bill Wake http://xp123.com/articles/twenty-ways-to-split-stories/  •  Rachel Davies 

http://agilecoach.typepad.com/agile-coaching/2010/09/ideas-for-slicing-user-stories.html

•  Richard Lawrence http://www.richardlawrence.info/2009/10/28/patterns-for-splitting-user-stories/

•  Lasse Koskela http://radio.javaranch.com/lasse/2008/06/13/1213375107328.html •  James Grenning http://www.renaissancesoftware.net/blog/archives/48 •  George Dinwiddie http://idiacomputing.com/pub/UserStories.pdf •  Joe Rainsberger 

http://www.jbrains.ca/permalink/how-youll-probably-learn-to-split-features •  Thomas http://agile-management.com/wordpress/splitting-user-stories/ •  Mark Levison 

http://agilepainrelief.com/notesfromatooluser/2010/09/story-slicing-how-small-is-enough.html and http://agilepainrelief.com/notesfromatooluser/2010/12/more-notes-on-story-splitting.html

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