Thank you for reading Snippets of Text. Snippets from media about tech, programming, parenting, and more. This is a preview of a post available exclusively to paying subscribers. You can get unlimited access to all articles by purchasing a subscription.
Unrelated: Enhancing UX Design
User experience (UX) design poses significant challenges when incorporating it into user stories. UX improvements require high-level impact and behavior changes, demanding careful execution before software implementation. Otherwise, designers may merely apply surface-level enhancements, leading to a false sense of success, over-engineered solutions, and, ultimately, the wrong products. To address this, planning to evaluate the outcome after delivering a story encourages better writing, similar to the effect of test-driven development on code. It fosters focus, clarity, and the delivery of superior solutions.
A practical strategy for managing these issues is to address global concerns at each milestone, establishing a framework applicable to all work within that delivery phase. By creating a pyramid of quality inspired by Maslow's hierarchy of needs, acceptance criteria can be added to each level. The pyramid's bottom-up questions are as follows: Does it work? (functionality and deployment), Does it work well? (security, performance, capacity), Is it usable? (usability, design), Is it useful? (behavior changes, user-level goals), and Is it successful? Consider developing a checklist of expectations for global concerns like usability and security. Importantly, involve a mix of senior technical and business personnel to ensure diverse perspectives and challenge assumptions, thus avoiding impractical or unattainable targets.
Implementing an effective triaging system for software projects involves stakeholders asking two crucial questions for each item: Is it mission-critical? (Can the business operate without it?) and Is it market-differentiating? (Does it attract customers, provide a competitive advantage, or similar benefits?). At the same time, the original purpose alignment model focuses on business processes rather than software features, and value statements ("To...") within user stories facilitate purpose alignment. Prioritize delivering the user interface part on a straightforward architecture, skipping any back-end components that may impede timely delivery, even for a short period. To minimize future surprises, aim to create a user interface that resembles the final version in appearance and functionality. Continuously iterate on the interface until the value delivery is confirmed, and then make minimal changes to the user interface when replacing the back end to avoid unexpected complications.
During initiating a new project or a legacy rewrite, teams often assert that an entire underlying infrastructure must be in place before providing any value. Instead of relying solely on estimation, start with a budget considering the significant operational costs and time required for substantial work. This budget serves as a design constraint for the delivery team, addressing scalability and performance. If modifications to the user interface are necessary, consider implementing multi-versioning to support uninterrupted usage. Rather than asking, "How long will it take?", inquire about the desired deadline and the budgetary limitations. The delivery team must devise solutions that adhere to these constraints. Estimating the exact financial value of a project may be challenging for most businesses, so exploring extreme scenarios can be helpful. For instance, determine the minimum impact the project needs to generate and the threshold that would deem it worthwhile for all stakeholders.
Story sizing often sparks heated debates in online forums and poses challenges for inexperienced teams. Inexperienced teams often misuse story sizes for long-term planning and capacity management, leading to detrimental outcomes and misrepresentation. Frequently, stories are roughly estimated months before delivery, inadvertently transforming initial approximations into strict commitments for specific dates. Cumulative calculations are made, projecting the eventual delivery of more oversized work items.
Off Topic: Improving Agility in User Stories
It is imperative to focus on improving information retrieval and speed. Instead of making commitments, provide users with options. Story maps outline significant user activities like booking a venue, purchasing a book, or attending a concert. Yet, activities like submitting ratings or social media posting are too small and do not need maps.
Always begin by identifying the backbone of the story map, the horizontal axis. Divide activities into high-level steps that are not technology-specific to help generate excellent ideas. Exceptional user stories should trigger behavior changes.
To tackle complex situations, split research tasks into separate stories with their respective goals. If a story is too difficult, it should be broken down into several accounts that address individual aspects. While creating a hamburger, technical components must be listed, quality attributes defined, options listed at various quality levels, unsatisfactory options removed, slices selected, and workflow steps kept at a high level with no more than ten steps.
Activity metrics need to be improved for measuring progress and managing all the information can be overwhelming for product managers. When market opportunities change, focus on significant work and avoid delaying it with unnecessary features. To prevent the story card hell problem, maintain many levels of abstraction in the backlog.
Thanks for taking a look at the free preview of Snippets of Text. If you find my work helpful, I would really appreciate it if you could consider subscribing to the paid version. This way I can spend more time coming up with new ideas to share with you.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Snippets of Text to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.