Today I propose an exercise to help us breaking down Stories that are too big to fit for a sprint.
This exercise is Lean oriented with this principle in mind :
“Perfection is achieved when there is nothing more to remove”
The goal is to determine all that is necessary to achieve our ultimate goal and park in another story what is not necessary right now in order to work on the bare minimum but still be in continuous delivery, to have feedback sooner and learn sooner.
It has nothing to do with Scrum and it is only something you can do to be more efficient in breaking down Product Backlog Items. I found that it helps to make stories simplier so easier for the team to estimate.
For exemple, if your PBI is about a happy path we could ask the team :
– What is a the user happy path here?
– What is an user unhappy path, when something breaks what is happening?
– Are all the unhappy path necessary to implement right now?
If the PBI is about Device options we could ask the team :
– What device are we going to support?
– From them, are all required right now?
– Which devices would be easier to implement?
As you see, by using these questions we determine what is all the necessary and we break them to finish only with what is necessary for now.
This helps to determine the sandbox for this story, dividing it in vertical pieces, or tracer bullets, from A to Z with shortcuts and not only all the As and Bs for now.
If you would like to dig more into this, I give you the link of The Liberators website where there is a cheatsheet you can download over there and follow along as you do backlog refinement.
