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0 pointsa-priori9y ago0 comments

When I worked on a team like this, the rule was that when you came free and are looking for work, before you started any new stories you looked at the work in progress to see if you can help out to expedite any of it. The idea is that it's everyone's responsibility to try to minimize the work in progress (Lean).

We also had the general expectation that one story should generally take no more than about two weeks. Before starting a story, if you think going in that it will be too big, then you try to limit the scope or defer parts of it into new stories until you're confident it can be done in two weeks.

Once a week we tracked how long stories were in the "In progress" column, and once it'd been up there for three or four weeks, people started asking how they can help wrap it up. I think the longest I remember a story being in progress was about 6-7 weeks, and that was real uncomfortable for us. Typical times were 1-3 weeks.

So we had a weekly cadence for demos, and product owners liked that they would see steady, regular progress rather than being inundated with sudden large dumps at sprint boundaries.

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frandroid9y ago· 1 in thread

Two weeks! Any story that takes more than 2 days is generally broken down into smaller stories. A two-week project is more like a small epic...

a-prioriOP9y ago

Lots of teams have different expectations about how granular a user story should be, and some of this has to do with the project. How fast can you design, develop, test and deploy a meaningful amount of new content?

One explanation for the longer time is that we had a process where for each user story we'd write a short, informal design document and send it to the team and stakeholders for review. For non-trivial stories we'd then meet to discuss them and come to a consensus about how to implement it. This probably added about a day or two to a story's duration, but it meant that we had a solid system at all time. It also often served a similar purpose to a retrospective, or produce topics for a retrospective, because these meetings would surface any technical debt and other impediments to progress. It also served as knowledge transfer and helped the team converge on design principles and expectations.

So these meetings had a cost, but we felt it was essential for practicing agile design. We didn't find this made us slow to react. On the contrary, because this kept our technical debt low, and our software well designed and well understood by the whole team, it meant we could pivot on a dime.

I think there's a real risk in going too fast. Maximum speed should not be the goal of a software development process, and I don't think any business really wants that. The two primary goals should be: 1) to make predictable, steady progress over long periods of time, and 2) the ability to change priorities as quickly as possible as new information emerges. If you have to sacrifice some speed to get there, it may be worthwhile.