user story

We all know that a user story should not aim to capture all the detail about a requirement or business need. It is more of a promise that a conversation will take place, the options explored and some work will be done that will deliver that business value.
One of the key things to make sure of, when writing user stories, is to have a clear view as to when a piece of work is completed. The normal way of doing this is to document a set of acceptance criteria against a user story. What we don't want though is to write a 20 page requirements document as acceptance criteria.

Story Kick-off: Why on earth would we need one of these? Well think about it for a while, you have a project kick-off, an iteration kick-off. Any significant piece of work has a kick-off before work start, and for a very good reason. We need to make sure that there is a common understanding on what it is we are going to do, what we are going to deliver and how we are going to deliver it.

Try this as a standard agenda to a story kick-off and see how it immediately improves things

Story Kick-off

I am a firm believer in a big tactile visible physical radiator board. You can simply not beat it for something that serves as a focus for the team and help them maintain scrum practices. This can sometimes be a problem when the projects you are working on have outgrown hand-written index cards but are not yet big enough for a formal tool, or they simply need a little more formal retention. (read governance here).

An issue that often arises during the sprint retrospective (the most important Scrum event), for new teams is the fact that not enough is known about very new high priority stories to be able to estimate them. This leads to wildly varying estimations, arguments about how or what should be done, committed work not being completed during the iteration and a whole host more problems. It also make the negotiation between the Product owner and the team very 'interesting' during the planning session.

Reasons for these late arrivals could be: