Scrum in action...

Today I will tell an old story I heard in my childhood. You all might have read this.

Once upon a time, there lived six blind men in a village. One day an elephant came in their village. They had no idea what an elephant is. They decided, "Even though we would not be able to see it, let us go and feel it anyway." All of them went where the elephant was and touched the elephant.

"Hey, the elephant is a pillar," said the first man who touched his leg.

"Oh, no! it’s like a rope," said the second man who touched the tail.

"No! it’s like a thick branch of a tree," said the third man who touched the trunk of the elephant.

"It is like a big hand fan" said the fourth man who touched the ear of the elephant.

"It is like a huge wall," said the fifth man who touched the belly of the elephant.

"It is like a solid pipe," Said the sixth man who touched the tusk of the elephant.

They started arguments as per their perspectives. One passerby explained to them, "All of you are right. The reason every one of you is telling it differently because each one of you touched the different part of the elephant. So, actually the elephant has all those features what you all said."

Yes, you all got it right. Elephant is what we call an epic and the body parts are user stories. If the big picture is not known to all six men together, individually they will perceive it like pillar, rope, branch of tree, hand fan, huge wall and solid pipe.

This is the reason we all attend the daily scrum to understand the big picture and inspect & adapt. We review the development and do retrospective for improvement so that all parts get developed and integrated correctly. After all, all parts should be at appropriate place to complete the elephant.

Lights…Camera…Action!!!

Epic:

When a story is too large and estimation in nearly impossible it is referred to as an epic. Epics need to be further split into stories of smaller size.

Sample of epic:

As a user, I can backup all of my hard drives.

User Story:

A user story describes functionality that will be valuable to a user of a system.

Sample template for user story:

As a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason>.

User stories are composed of three aspects:

• Written description: This is description of the story used for planning and as a reminder

• Conversation: Conversations about the user story serve to flesh out the details of the story

• Tests: Tests convey and document details and that can be used to determine the completeness of user story.

Who writes user stories?

The customer team writes the user stories. This is because the user story should be written in the language of the business. Also the customer team can prioritize the stories for inclusion into iterations and releases.

INVEST in the user stories:

Good stories have six attributes. Bill Wake, author of Extreme Programming Explored and Refactoring Workbook, coined the acronym INVEST for this.

So what is INVEST? 

• Independent

• Negotiable

• Valuable to users or customers

• Estimatable

• Small

• Testable

We will go into details of epic and user storied in my next post. Please post your feedback and queries so I could include the reply in my next post or try my best to reply as soon as possible.