Planning with stories Flashcards
Set deadlines for addressing major risks
Prevent decision-makers focussing on short-term wins and neglecting long-term risks, until the work becomes completely unsustainable.
Put a ‘best before’ date on stories that deal with risks as decision points for incremental investment. ‘Develop for business value – once the risks are down’. Creating a hierarchical backlog can help with this.
Use hierarchical backlogs
Try to divide your plan into several tiers, and then avoid breaking down a higher-level item until you complete all the relevant lower-level stories for the previous higher-level item. Keep things in a hierarchy so you can monitor, discuss and report on the big-picture items.
A hierarchical plan allows the organisation to react effectively to changing market opportunities. It allows stakeholders to change priorities at any level
and quickly discard a whole hierarchy of items if they are no longer applicable.
A visual connection between different levels also makes it difficult to hide scope creep. Unnecessary features are much easier to spot because there is a higher-level context for each deliverable.
4 tiers of a hierarchical backlog
- big-picture business objective, for example, grow mobile subscriptions
- smaller-scale business change that might contribute to that big picture, for example, longer user engagement from mobile devices, better conversion from web to mobile, easier migration from competitor systems
- software deliverables that might support those changes, for example, data import from competitor formats, mobile data preview
- smaller deliverable slices that we could ship independently, for example, file access to competitor systems, importing individual data formats, a mobile preview page
Group stories by impact: how?
use impact maps.
What is an impact map?
An impact map is a visualisation (mind map) of how deliverable scope connects to business goals and the underlying assumptions on four levels.
Give the four levers of an impact map
- The first level of the mind map is the business goal for a milestone of a project or a product delivery.
- The second level of the mind map contains user segments, stakeholders or actors who will be involved in achieving the goal.
- The third level of the map shows the impacts on users and stakeholders that can contribute to the business goal, or that could hinder achieving the objective.
- The fourth level of the map is for the deliverables – user stories or even larger deliverables (such as epics) that can cause the impacts.
Create a user story map: what does it show?
User story maps connect software deliverables to customer journeys and business workflows, showing how individual stories contribute to the bigger picture and providing a great visual representation of release plans.
A story map is a grid where the horizontal axis represents steps in a high-level user activity, and the vertical axis represents the software delivery schedule (releases or milestones). User stories are grouped in the grid based on the activity or workflow step they contribute to. Stories are spread vertically based on delivery priority, optionally identifying the release they are planned for.
Example: “Discovering books” would be a good candidate for the key step on the backbone, and “social recommendations” would be a good candidate story for that vertical.
Change behaviours using the CREATE funnel
- Cue: the possibility of action needs to cross the person’s mind
- Reaction: the person automatically and intuitively reacts to the idea in a fraction of a second, generating an emotional response
- Evaluation: the person thinks about the action consciously, evaluating the costs and benefits
- Ability: the person evaluates whether the action is feasible given the current context
- Timing: the person judges whether they should act now or later
- Executing
Good user stories typically aim to bring about a behaviour change, so you should be able to link a story with a part of the CREATE funnel for the relevant persona. This supports hierarchical planning and prioritisation.
Set out global concerns at the start of a milestone
global concerns (security, performance, etc) apply to almost all stories, but the related requirements change on a much slower timescale. A good strategy for dealing with such issues is to have a separate discussion about global concerns once per milestone. This leads to a framework which applies to all work during that phase of delivery, so that the issues do not need to be individually considered for each story.
Mention 2 techniques that focus on making global concerns visible
- create a FURPS+ mind map. (FURPS stands for functionality, usability, reliability, performance, supportability)
- create a pyramid of quality based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and add an acceptance criterion to each level.
Describe how to make a FURPS+ map
FURPS stands for functionality, usability, reliability, performance, supportability.
1- Draw six branches of a mind map, and label five according to the FURPS acronym. Label the sixth branch with a plus sign.
2- Then let people brainstorm and extend the mind map with their expectations in each area.
3- The sixth (plus) branch is for global items that don’t fall into any of the five categories. Implementation constraints, resource limitations, interface constraints, operational requirements and licensing requirements all go in this category.
Prioritise according to stages of growth (growth model)
Balance short- and long-term needs according to stages of growth.
A common growth model:
- Empathy: figuring out how to solve a real problem in a way that people will pay for
- Stickiness: building the right product to keep users around
- Virality: growing the user base organically and artificially
- Revenue: establishing a sustainable, scalable business model with the right margins in a healthy ecosystem
- Scale: growing the busines
Prioritise using purpose alignment
The purpose alignment model is a good alternative to the MoSCoW model.
The model requires stakeholders to ask two questions for each item:
1- Is it mission critical? (Can the business run without it?)
2- Is it market differentiating? (Does it bring customers, provide competitive advantage or something similar?)
- Differentiating: both mission critical and market differentiating. This is the area where organisations should focus most of their investment. For such items, good just isn’t enough, excellence is required.
- Parity: mission critical, but not market differentiating. These are things that have to be done, but they can just be good enough. Making them significantly better than the competition is an over-investment.
- Partner: market-differentiating opportunities that aren’t mission critical, for example opening up an experimental sales channel using mobile devices.
- Who cares: ideas that aren’t mission critical or market differentiating.
A major advantage of the purpose alignment model over MoSCoW is:
it has two categories for ‘must’: differentiating and parity.
They are both mission critical, but the former creates value and the latter provides the necessary foundation.
It’s easy to separate out the items we must invest and excel in from those that just have to be good enough.
purpose alignment model: If you’ve inherited a large number of user stories, or business stakeholders insist on detailing things into minute items, it’s best to…
first group stories by business activity or area of impact, and then sort the higherlevel items into quadrants of the purpose alignment model.
