Here are some things I add to each user story, as necessary, in the run-up to development:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, before you burn me at the stake, hear me out. I\u2019m fully aware this is the antithesis of Jefferies\u2019 \u2018placeholders for (in-sprint) conversations\u2019 and somewhat at odds with Cockburn\u2019s \u2018walking skeleton\u2019 concept. I\u2019m not \u2018agile ignorant\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, my professional work is within established financial services firms that predominantly use offshore development teams, and I can\u2019t remember the last time I saw a software product built iteratively and informed by direct feedback from the most recently finished sprint. I\u2019m sorry, but I just can\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, I am afforded the luxury of collecting story details ahead of time, whilst remaining mindful not to overly solutionise, and the offshore developers are generally grateful to receive greater story context during refinement. However, do we regularly check in and discuss the boundary between my work and theirs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps most interestingly though, the \u2018narrating stories with details\u2019 approach was first proposed in 2012 by Jeff Sutherland, one of the co-creators of Scrum, under the \u2018Enabling Specifications<\/strong>\u2019 [1] name, although it never did make it formally into Scrum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Scrum Book [2], an online library of Scrum literature and supporting patterns etc. (not to be confused with the Scrum Guide), explains the underlying rationale for Enabling Specifications as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, and I wholeheartedly agree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m a huge fan of Enabling Specifications and draft them pretty much every day. However, they work best in the right context, which for me is offshore \u2018feature factory\u2019 Scrum teams, building line-of-business software or consumer-facing websites, for established companies in the UK. I carry no shame working this way, the opposite, in fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lean Agile Training, whom I am not personally associated with, provides some excellent advice [3] for those wanting to practice the art of Enabling Specifications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here are some things I add to each user story, as necessary, in the run-up to development: Now, before you burn me at the stake, hear me out. I\u2019m fully aware this is the antithesis of Jefferies\u2019 \u2018placeholders for (in-sprint) conversations\u2019 and somewhat at odds with Cockburn\u2019s \u2018walking skeleton\u2019 concept. I\u2019m not \u2018agile ignorant\u2019. However, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agile","category-software-requirements","missing-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=689"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":761,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689\/revisions\/761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
References<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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