Case Study: Thinking Small
A detailed case study illustrating how to make a story smaller, and implement it incrementally.
This is Part Two of my discussion to help Dev teams, Product Owners, and Scrum Masters to 'think small' so that their stories are sized to fit within a single sprint.
The technique I present is one I have used to guide my own dev teams for many years and their results have always been excellent. My narrative is rather long (9 pages) and comprehensive, so I am offering it to my subscribers only, as a PDF titled "Slicing a Story into Thin Threads," on the Resources page of my website.
In this PDF I use a realistic feature from a Vehicle Reservation System to analyze a story that initially seems to be quite small, and then I incrementally deconstruct it into manageable, cohesive stories that really are quite small. Along the way I introduce a wonderful technique called Story Mapping, developed by Jeff Patton, and I demonstrate how to built the required functionality using a Simple-to-Complex slicing pattern. I also review how this 'thin thread' approach leverages Henrik Kniberg's tiers of 'minimalism' to minimize Cost of Delay.
I hope this article will provoke some serious discussions within your teams and organization, and that you will experiment with this approach to see if they also can realize the expected benefits.
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I love working with teams and executives to find effective solutions. Email me at gary@effectivescrummaster.com and let's explore how we might partner on your challenges.
