Electronic — physical backlog hybrid
This post is part of 101 ideas for agile teams.
Context
Your team likes to work with a physical Scrum board because a physical board is much more flexible than all the available electronic backlog tools. Your team would like to have a physical story map for its product backlog, but their stakeholders want access to the current status from remote locations. So they insist on an electronic product backlog because they cannot stand in front of a physical story map product backlog.
Action
Introduce levels of user stories and handle them differently:
- Epic: big user story that describes whole parts of the product to build
As Emma the HR person I want happy employees so that they work with more motivation. - User story: describes a single thing valuable to a user
As Emma the HR person I want to know the names of all employees whose birthday is today so that I can get them a present. … - Feature: one piece of the product that together with other features enables a user story, typically strongly related to the structure of the code
Store birthday in employee profile. Notify Emma about today’s birthdays. Schedule birthday reminder every weekday at 07:00. … - Tasks: a single thing that team members work on, used to coordinate the team’s work during the Sprint
Save birthdays. Query today’s birthdays. Implement notifications. …
Think of these levels as of a pyramid: at the top are a small number of epics, below are some more user stories, then quite a lot of features and at the bottom a lot of tasks.
Epics are split into user stories during product backlog refinement.
User stories are split into features during product backlog refinement and put onto the story map.
Features are split into tasks during Sprint planning 2.
Epics and user stories are important to the Scrum team and all stakeholders.
Features and tasks are relevant only to the Scrum team — they just are a too detailed view for the stakeholders.
Now you can hold all epics and user stories in an electronic tool that is accessible for all stakeholders and the Scrum team, put all features onto a physical story map, and put all tasks onto a physical Scrum board.
What you gain
Your team can plan and work with physical boards:
- Product backlog in the form of a story map
- Scrum board
This makes planning meetings and the daily work with tasks much easier and team members are more engaged because physical boards are much more visible than electronic tools and everybody can make changes — not only the person with the keyboard. Physical boards also provide a much better overview of the work to be done.
Your stakeholders are always up-to-date on the status of the work on a granularity level that is suited for them and neither too detailed nor too high level.
Features and tasks are created, updated and removed — because they are done or not needed — much more frequently than epics and user stories. Therefore, working with features and tasks should be as efficient as possible. Physical boards in contrast to electronic boards offer the efficiency needed.
How to strengthen
Continuously improve your understanding of the distinction of user stories and features. What is really relevant to stakeholders (user stories) and what is only relevant for the Scrum team (features).
Risks
Physical and electronic views get out of sync. Make sure that you update changes made on user stories on physical boards and backlogs in their electronic twins.
Please help me improve this idea by providing feedback.
More ideas at 101 ideas for agile teams
Many thanks to bbv Software Services for making this blog post possible.
