Bad Story Spotting

Today, I was having a chat with a few others. It was long and rambling but the conclusion was kind of nice. We realised that every single issue we were talking about really started with how we prepare our stories. We often have bad stories that make it through and then we have to deal with the problems in the sprint, which is terrible for everyone concerned.

So we came up with 3 ways of spotting a bad story rather than trying to decide what a good one would look like. All have to pass for this to be a story that we should do. The vision was that the team can 'test' a story before allowing it to be worked on ensuring the team have the final call on responsibility.

1) Does it have any assumptions or risks?

No.... none? Don't believe it. It would be a truly exceptional story that has neither of these. If there are no risks then I would bet that this is either too small or there is no value in the story. Neither are good. The most common reason is that we simply didn't think or come up with any, which is not the same as there not being any.

If there are some assumptions and risks then we should find out if we are happy with them. Can we mitigate the risks we have identified? Are there any experiments we can run to find out some more? Are the risks worth it and we are happy with the trade off (which will probably be longer delivery time)?

Spotting assumptions in a discussion is actually very easy - "Well, IF we did this...", "What about..." or the clanger "Assuming....". Stop, ask for it to be a sentence and write it down!

Risks require a little more effort. We have some questions we can asks "What is likely to take the longest?", "What have we not done before?", "What is only known by a few members of the team?". Using Liz Keogh's scale for estimating complexity is a nice tool too which should help you uncover the risks of key parts of a story.

2) Do we all see the same thing?

I was introduced to a great game in a workshop with Tobias Mayer. You create a character by each person in your group adding one feature at a time. When you can no longer 'see' the character, the next person has to explain how the character makes sense to them - this is to help you see it.

At the start of your story or during planning, you can call out what you need to do for a story in order one person at a time. If anyone does not see the same thing you can challenge by saying that you cannot 'see it', allowing you to spot if things are missing. When we cannot think of anything else to add, we can check that we all 'see it' and move on.

You can also do this using diverge and merge if you task out stories. This where everyone creates tasks and then we merge these together to see where we agree or have different ideas. Both are valuable - similarities suggest something we should definitely do whilst singular tasks merit conversation since we might have missed something.

If we don't see the same thing, we need to spend a bit more time making sure we do. Doing this with the people who will actually develop the story is absolutely required. Extra points if you are using the 3 Amigo's for this conversation.

3) Will this take longer than...

Yes, estimates suck. This isn't quite that. You pick a line in the sand and you decide that stories should not take longer. This is your stories delivered and everything that entails. For my team, at time of writing we are trying to get everything into production in 5 days or less. We are miles off but that is our line in the sand.

To reach the hallowed land, our stories need to be smaller and the line in the sand helps us recognise stories that do not fit the goal.

You need to take constraints into account. We know our path to live is not a super smooth highway so we take that into account and ask, "Will I be done with development in 3 days?". If not, then we need to break this story down, it is too big.

You can also use the awesome "No busllsh*t" cards from Lunar Logic, which approaches this from a different angle.