Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
I'm trying to figure out when using user stories is appropriate. Always or not?
For an example, think about a team starting to work on something from scratch, say a movie ticket reservation service. It's easy to come up with user stories for the functionality, like:
"As an end-user I want to be able to browse the movies running in theater X" and so on.
But before those can be implemented, the system needs to be designed: Architecture must be designed, database must be designed, technologies chosen for the GUI and business logic.
How should these tasks appear in the backlog? Should they be user stories as well? If so, how do they comply with the INVEST mnemonic? They don't alone deliver anything for the end-user, but nevertheless they are needed before any feature can be implemented.
But before those can be implemented, the system needs to be designed: Architecture must be designed, database must be designed, technologies chosen for the GUI and business logic.
Not really agree with it. Since a story is a feature which takes almost every layer of your architecture implementing the story builds up the architecture same time. Check up Alistair Cockburn's Walking Skeleton definition.
About the question
Most of the stories you may define as "As a user..." as a feature the story may has UI work as well. So to make it clear you may split up the story into subtasks.
Although some work would be hard to present in INVEST user stories. For instance bugs, tech. dept and so on. They still be presented as stories of a special type(Bugs, tech stories). you couldn't show them on Demo however you may mention about.
(...) before those can be implemented, the system needs to be designed: Architecture must be designed, database must be designed, technologies chosen for the GUI and business logic. (...)
Not exactly. E.g., you don't need to get the entire database designed for implementing functionalities for a sprint, a specific release or whatever given time. What you may need is some common ground.
This is where one of the Agile's beauties lives (vs. waterfall), welcoming change.
Now, answering your question: realize that the role in a user story is not necessary a role of the end customer. Could be your developers, your sysadmins, etc. As such:
AS A server administrator,
I WANT to upgrade our webserver
SO THAT it will handle better the memory consumption
So, you could ask convince your P.O. to add or prioritize in the backlog an user story (or several) for building up some ground for the future development. But, again, when creating such stories remember the Agile value of Responding to change.
P.S.
It's also important to keep the Product Backlog clear and accessible, and provide properly interaction between P.O. and Development Team. This should be guided by the Scrum Master.
This way the team could give better feedback/warn the P.O., in a technical perspective, how one story affect each other and why should story X should be done before story Y.
Related
Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.
Closed 6 years ago.
Improve this question
When developing safety-critical software using some quality standards (like e.g. IEC 61508 or DO 178-C) developers have to care about many things. I know that the verification in each development step is quite time consuming and expensive. Moreover, I know that some reduced programming languages are used.
But I am interested in the concrete difference to a "normal" SW-development process. I mean in the standard V-Model, verification and testing should also be part of each development step. What do I have to consider finding requirements? What do I have to consider in SW design?
It isn't so much as a change in the "V Model" that helps verify critical system, it's what you do at each step of the way.
For example you may prefer to plan your development using waterfall in order to have verification steps and controlled transition periods. This has the benefit of staying in line with any government regulations that may be in place.
While developing it is common to use a limited subset of assemblies (APIs) in order to prevent developers from preforming dangerous operations. This type of restriction can also ensure that developers utilize the APIs correctly, such as cleaning up objects as a requirement.
Once the product has been developed you'll likely have gone through all of the testing phases. It is common in industry to develop test fixtures in order to verify and generate data to prove to the government or customers that your system says what it does.
In general, this topic is very deep. You did mention standards, one more is the ISO 2008 standard. I think what you should keep in mind is that the process doesn't change much (the life cycle model stays generally the same). But what you do at each step of the model will change depending on the project. You can take classes on Project Management... In fact it is a tract and sometimes a full degree program. So there's tons to learn about process and how to manage different projects.
Googling system critical projects and project management will likely generate a trove of knowledge.
Hope that helps shed some like on the subject.
EDIT: Finding requirements, like in a waterfall process, is very time consuming. It will involve understanding the customers needs and goals of course. In general you have to spend lots of time in this area for government reasons and software architecture. It's not really a different technique... Be explicit, understanding the requirements is most critical. The system shall recover from 90 second timeouts within 5 seconds of resetting. <- its like all other requirements in SW engineering... Explicit and testable. Objective not subjective. Think Grammer Nazi level of consideration.
One example of a safety critical systems is lockheeds F-35... The system requirements manuals are huge and the process to make a change requires meetings and quite a bit of paperwork.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question does not appear to be about programming within the scope defined in the help center.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
I am a product owner and I am helping setup a themed sprint. To be clear, by themed I mean all the users stories are related or cluster around a common goal. I still have other stories that don't work well in the theme that I want to include. The problem is that when I fragment the vision of a sprint we don't work as well. Any suggestions?
The problem is that when I fragment the vision of a sprint we don't work as well. Any suggestions?
First of all, you and your Team yourself can answer this question, because only you and your Team have the most knowledge about your situation. I know you wish there was a Scrum Manual where you could refer to some page and get the answer but you have to be factual - Scrum's simple framework never suggests that you have themed Sprints. In fact it suggests that the PO prioritize the uncommitted Backlog list of user stories based on their value and ROI, irrespective of themes, as long as the stories follow the I.N.V.E.S.T Principle, and prioritized periodically. Not that there is something wrong with theming, but if it is not working for you or your Team then you have to adapt to something new, that works for you and the Team. Here are some basic suggestions from my side:
Taking a leaf out of another members post I can say that you and your Team, need an ingredient, which is called "Courage"
The SM of the Team, along with you, needs to have the Courage to use the "Inspect and Adapt" principle to find out why fragmenting is not working for the Team.
As long as the Product Backlog is "ready" before you go into Sprint Planning, The Team needs to have Courage to trust you, the PO, in prioritizing the work for them, irrespective of their own wish or desire or way of thinking.
If fragmented Sprints is what will bring most value, then you as the PO need to have the Courage to talk openly to the Team during the Retrospective about why fragmented Sprints is the way to go, and we need to make it work until you guys find an adapted way of working in that fashion.
Lastly Everyone i.e. The Team, the SM and you need to gather the facts and notes from the above discussions, and come to a common consensus and have the courage to try it until you achieve your goals.
Keep in mind, all this needs to be done within the simple Scrum Framework rules stated in the Scrum Guide.
If you have main vision of the sprint it doesn't mean that you can't include user story which is not part of that vision. User stories are included mainly by their business priority not by their theme. So if you have user story with higher priority than your themed stories you should include it. In my opinion, themed sprints make sence only if priorities reflect splitting user stories into themes.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
If everything in scrum is all about functional things that a user can see is there really any place for refactoring code unrelated to any new functional requirements?
I don't think that this has as much to do with Scrum as it does with project management philosophy.
Regardless of whether a project uses Scrum or not, many project managers do not like developers spending time on "unnecessary" things like code refactoring or restructuring that doesn't directly advance one of the outstanding functional requirements. It's not "work that yields results" like normal development, it's "work that prevents a delay of results later". Given the typically short time-lines used for Sprints, the benefit is often hard to see and nearly impossible to quantify.
Keeping code maintainable needs to be an item on your burn-down list (if you use a Scrum). It is just as important as new development. While it may not seem like something that is "visible to the user", ignoring it increases your technical debt. Down the road when the technical debt piles up enough that your code's lack of maintainability slows down development, the delays in new feature development will be visible to customers.
It's all a matter of management/philosophy. Instead of looking at refactoring and maintainability enhancements as "extra" work that doesn't impact customers, it should be viewed as a time investment to prevent customer-visible delays (and potentially bugs as well) down the road. Developers can sometimes see these benefits more clearly than managers can; if your manager doesn't understand the disadvantages of neglecting maintainability, you might want to grab several other developers and have a chat with your manager.
I think there is a fair case to make for technical debt refactoring where the effort/cost impact of maintaining the code is as high as, or higher even, than the cost of refactoring it to improve quality or work better / properly - specifically to lend it a higher degree of maintainability.
eg: if the software is so problematic you are losing customers, or money, you'd act fast to fix it.. Some might argue this is a business requirement of it's own, but it's often not placed front and centre on small to mid sized development projects, which instead focus on the technicalities of creating apps rather than the impact of the quality of the app on the bottom line.
I think you are probably talking about large scale refactoring rather than the continuous refactoring you would do whilst in the whole red-green-refactor cycle.
My approach would be something like this, if reafactoring an old feature makes it easier to add a new feature then go ahead and do it. But in some ways you are right, if there is no pressure on a particular unit to change (i.e. it is completely finished and will never change again and will never impact on other modules) then there is no practical need to refactor. However I rarely find a module that is quite so finalised.
If everything in Scrum is all about functional things that a user can see (...)
Any project and methodology should be about generating business value, you rarely do things just for the fun in a business environment. Having that said, I see quality in Scrum (and other Agile methods) as a way to not kill your velocity on the long run and, ultimately to achieve hyper productivity. I thus believe that a typical "Definition of Done" should include something like "no increase of technical debt" (put your quality standards in there). If you think a new feature will impact existing code that should be refactored, include this cost in the estimate (or create a refactoring item in your Product Backlog) and explain things to your Product Owner. Because at the end, it's up to the Product Owner to prioritize items and to decide if quality can be sacrificed temporarily (if your business die because you don't release a feature, what is the point of refactoring existing code?). But he must be aware that this can't be a long term strategy or he will kill the team velocity.
bta: Regardless of whether a project uses Scrum or not, many project managers do not like developers spending time on "unnecessary" things like code refactoring or restructuring that doesn't directly advance one of the outstanding functional requirements.
Definitely a noteworthy observation; my solution to this would be as follows:
Perform regular code reviews. Every code review should recommend actions to improve on deficiencies in the code.
There is now a requirement for jobs which improve code quality. Build these into the sprint and track them in the same way as any other job.
If your manager needs any more convincing, cast 'the maintainer' as a user, and describe some user stories for them - and then 'features' are things like 'the code is fully commented with xml doc comments' and 'the code does not produce any warnings from ReSharper'
If you can justify it as part of the process of completing other tasks by identifying issues/risks with current sets of code, and it is a better end result, go for it. But don't get overzealous and screw the timelines/budget.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question does not appear to be about programming within the scope defined in the help center.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
We've been using Scrum on a few projects now with varying success and I now have a query relating to documentation.
In Scrum, you obviously have the product backlog ("The application begins by bringing up the last document the user was working with.") and the sprint task backlog ("Implement forgot password screen"). However, in all the examples I have seen, these two items are fairly high level in terms of detail (being designed on fit on a post-it note).
So, where does the detail sit? Let's say the client has some very specific requirements for a stock management screen, or has a complex API that needs to be integrated with on the back end, where is this documented, how and who captures this information? Is it seperate to the backlog but populated on a just-in-time basis or some other way?
Sprint backlog
The sprint backlog is a greatly
detailed document containing
information about how the team is
going to implement the requirements
for the upcoming sprint. Tasks are
broken down into hours with no task
being more than 16 hours. If a task is
greater than 16 hours, it should be
broken down further. Tasks on the
sprint backlog are never assigned,
rather tasks are signed-up for by the
team members as they like.
Detail can sit in a wiki available to the whole team and editable by the whole team.
Not sure if this is as simple as it sounds. We've seen challenges with the detail part as well. Lets say if we're developing on a story that requires capturing simple contact information for lets say a CRM system. I now have the stories from the PO and we went through the sprint planning meeting and understood the first 5 stories that meets our velocity. However its always a struggle on capturing all the details of the conversation, for example how the screen needs to be laid out, what are the 20+ fields you need to have on the screen, can some of these fields lookup information from other tables/views etc.
Who captures those details, should it be the PO or developer and whats the best practice for storing these details. We're right now trying to use wiki's for this, however it becomes an overhead in trying to maintain the action items on who needs to update which details and by when.
My understanding is that specific requirements such as this are handled by the product owner. They will liase with the client during Sprint Planning 2 and update the tasks with specfic requirements as needed - hence why the Product Owner is a optional attendee of the Sprint Planning 2 meeting. This gives you a hybrid of Just-in-Time and Sprint Planning 2 population of the specifics. Anything that isn't satisfied by the time you come to work on the task will be an impediment and should be dealt with a the daily scrum, by the product owner.
As the development is Agile when using Scrum you shouldn't find too much of an issues getting requirements just in time.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
We are a small team of 3 developers (2 experienced but new to this particular business sector) developing a functionally complex product. We're using Scrum and have a demo at the end of each sprint. Its clear that the functional team have plenty of ideas but these are not well communicated to the development team and the demo poses more questions than answers.
Have you any recommendations for improving the the quality of input from the functional people?
Further info: I think part of the problem is that there are no specs or User Stories as such. Personally I think they need to be writing down some sort of requirements - what sort of things should they be writing down and to what complexity given its an agile process?
Have you tried working with your customer to define / formulate acceptance tests?
Using something like Fit to come up with these tests - would result in better specs as well as force the customer to think about what is really required. The icing on the cake is instant-doc-executable specs at the end of this process.
That is of course, if your customers are available and open to this approach. Give it a try!
If not (and that seems to be the majority - because it is less work) - calendar flash 'em - schedule meetings/telecons every week until they sing like canaries :) +1 to Dana
Sometimes the easiest way to get input from people is to force it out of them. My company used SCRUM on a project, and found very quickly that people tend to keep to themselves when they already know what they're doing. We ended up organizing weekly meetings where team members were required to display something that was learned during the week. It was forced, but it worked pretty well.
I'm a big believer in Use Cases, detailing the system behaviour in response to user actions. Collectively these can form a loose set of requirements, and in a SCRUM environment can help you prioritise the Use Cases which will form that particular sprint's implemented features.
For example, after talking to your functional team you identify 15 separate Use Cases. You prioritise the Use Cases, and decided to plan for 5 sprints. And the end of each sprint you go through and demo the product fulfilling the Use Cases implemented during the sprint, noting the feedback and amending the Use Cases.
I understand that the people you call functional people are acting as Product Owners, right?
I think part of the problem is that there are no specs or User Stories as such. Personally I think they need to be writing down some sort of requirements - what sort of things should they be writing down and to what complexity given its an agile process?
Actually, without having any specs you probably have no acceptance test for the backlog itens as well. You should ask the PO to write the user stories, I like the "As a - type of user -, I want -some goal- so that -some reason-." form. Keep in mind that the User Stories shall be INVEST - Independent, Negotiable, Valuable to users or customers, Estimable, Small and Testable. What is a must is to have the Acceptance tests written together with the story so that the team should know what the story must be able to do in order do be set as done.
Remember that as the product evolves, it's expected to the PO have ideas as he sees the working product. It's not a bad thing, actually it is one of the best thing you can get through Agile. What you have to pay attention is that this ideas mus be included in the product backlog and it needs to be prioritized by th PO. And, if it's necessary and will add value to the customer, the idea should be planned to be built in the next sprint.
Someone from the functional team should be part of the team and available to answer your questions about the features you're adding.
How can you estimate the Backlog item if they are not detailled enough ?
You could establissh a rule that Backlog item that do not have clear acceptance criteria cannot be planned.
If would be better to have someone from the functional team acting as Product Owner, to determine, choose and priotitize the Backlog items, and/or as Domain Expert.
Also, make sure everyone in both the functional team and the development team speaks the same language, so as to avoid misunderstandings ; See ubiquitous language.
Track the time most waiting for answers from the functional team as well as he time wasted developping unnecessary features or reworking existing features so that they fits the bill.
Are they participating in the stand-up meetings?
You could propose to have a representative at each (or some) of them, to ask them for input before the end of the sprint
Are you doing stand-up meetings and do you have burn down chart? I think those two areas would benefit you greatly.
I recommend the book "Practices of an agile developer" it is full of suggestions how to make a scrum team successful. It also gives good tips how to get the product owner/customer more involved and how to get the whole process rolling. It's worth the money IMHO.
I agree that you need some sort of requirements (user stories or else).
One piece of advice I can give is to use some sort of visual aids with the functional teams. When customers have plenty of ideas (as you've said) they usually also have a visual idea of what a feature looks like, when the developed product doesn't fit this visual idea it creates a lot of doubts, even if it does the job functionally.
When discussing functionality with customers, I try to be very visual. Drawing sketches on a board, or even verbally describing what something would look like. Trying to find a common visual image. You can then take a photo of the sketches and use them as part of the documentation.
Another advice is to keep your sprints as short as possible, so that you do more frequent demos. But you may already be doing this, since you didn't mention your current sprint duration.