DirtyInformation

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Smaller is Better

“OMG, can we stop worrying about these stories and get to work?”

“Yeah, I’m tired of this.”

“Really, another story?”

“Isn’t this one small enough.”

We have all been been in meetings like this. Someone on the team is pushing for tiny stories and we just want to get to work. I’m here to tell you that you might want to keep splitting the stories.

What is up with all this obsession over tiny stories?

Think back to the last few stories that your team was asked to estimate. How accurate where your estimates? I’m willing to bet that your estimates where shy of their mark, or you had to cut corners to meet them. How accurate is the last story that you estimated at two weeks? How accurate was the last story that you estimated at two hours? Which was closer to the mark? The further out that we have to predict anything the harder it is to be right.

Let’s just look at a small story, shall we?

  Given I attempt to register
  When my email is not propperly formatted
  Then my registration cannot be completed

Now, I admit that this story could deal with an obscene amount of format issues, but I would stop right here. I estimate it at less than a day. There isn’t much left open to interpretation. There is a little wiggle room on how the registration is not completed, but there isn’t room to run wild. It would be very difficult for the scope creeper to rear his ugly head. Scope creeper says, “I just saw that we need to make sure the user provides a password.” You can respond with, “Yeah, we should make another story and throw it in the queue and get back to the EMAIL ADDRESS!” Then move on.

Code reviews are one of my favorite practices. I love that someone else on the team is going to take a look at the code I wrote with my pair. I also like to look at other code. This is a great learning experience for all of us. Oh, wait I meant until the 12000 line diff pops up. Who wants to code review 12000 lines? Are you more likely to look at it objectively or skim right through? With small and focused stories it is simpler to see the design and understand what trade offs might have been taken. You probably even have a commit message that makes sense.

Your code made it past code review and it is on to QA to take a stab at it. How many times has QA asked you why your story doesn’t do x? How many times has good functionality been held up because of a vague story? With the focused story above QA can concentrate on what matters. How many different ways can I not properly format and email?

The penultimate advantage to small stories is the flexibility provided to the customer in planning and priority discussions. When small pieces of functionality are constantly provided to the customer they can more intelligently decide what the priorities should be. Let’s say that the original design of our registration had the user verify their email. I know I love typing my email twice on every registration.

  Given I attempt to register
  When I fat finger my email
  Then my registration cannot be completed

This story would more than likely be prioritized much lower on the board in a time constrained situation. We know that we are always time constrained. Now we get it out the door and find out that very few users are fat fingering and the customer would much rather do the game changing feature that we are excited about. We are also so happy that another customer didn’t make our users jump through some arbitrary hoop in order to use the product. We saved the day with a small story.

Now, the moment you’ve been waiting for, the ultimate fun in small stories, throwing them away. Wait, what? Doesn’t that mean we wasted our time writing the story. NO! A story is a promise of a conversation. It is not a promise of a delivered piece of functionality. Scope creeper came in and said what about:

  Give I attempt to register
  When I don't provide an email
  Then my registration cannot be complete

When we get around to coding this we notice that this is already halted by the email format story we already completed. The customer decides that the error message we provided earlier is good enough for a blank email. SCORE! We can now toss that story in the trash and get back to that game changer.

One last and quick advantage. If we move forward with these tiny stories we give plenty of room for parallelization to be done. One pair finishes the email format while another team is checking the password length. We just can’t convince the customer to let the password be as long as the user wants.

Please, take the time to make your stories as tiny as you can. It will make the world a better place, one verification field at a time.

The Past

Contact Me

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Binary Noggin
Email
contact@binarynoggin.com
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Adkron
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@binarynoggin
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This Agile Life