How complex is your user story?
User stories are fun to write. Especially during the initial stages, when the requirements seem clear enough, writing user stories means including all the scenarios and covering all the edge cases. The writer in you develops a flow and keeps expanding the story.
Only that, instead of a user story, you are now writing an epic! With so much to document and get built, PMs rarely focus on the complexity of the user story, until they reach the dev handover step.
In a perfect world, you’d start writing epics, and create smaller user stories focusing on individual parts of your epic. In reality, you almost always write the epic description in the end. This happens for various reasons, mainly this: developers focus on individual stories more than the parent epic. Epics are used for release management, and so on.
Handing over a complex, heavy user story will only delay the release date of your user story. It will add time to QA, it will increase the number of clarification questions and meetings. It will also make it difficult for you to justify the priority of the user story — your stakeholders won’t care about user stories as much as they care about the release timelines.
Most importantly, a complex user story would make your development less agile. Going back to the waterfall model, something you were taught to stay away from, won’t be any fun. Quick, high-quality shipping is what everyone seeks from you.
So what can you do to reduce the complexity of your user story? You can use a 3-step approach:
- Define logical starts and ends of parts of your user story. If there is more than one endpoint, you need to break the story down
- After breaking the story down, if you see some stories to be ridiculously small in scope, and hard to define their success criteria — merge them into one user story
- Come back to these user stories after an hour, if not after a day, and see if all these user stories make a logical flow. Rework if needed
Simple, crisp user stories are easier to track and help your devs quickly turn around complex features. They help you give better shipping timelines.
It’s also way easier to prioritise/de-prioritise simpler user stories, keeping the stakeholders’ needs and wants in mind.
Originally published on: https://tealfeed.com/complex-user-story-2bw06
