This is part 2 of the hidden gems in refinement, you will find part 1 as the previous post on my blog.

Part 2 of refinement continues as part 1 if you did not manage to finalise part 1 in the first refinement. ( get all stories estimated in T-shirt sizes ) -ultimately, the t-shirt sizing is good enough to start your sprint planning, but I always try to add another level and dig a bit deeper in the stories if time allows it. The sooner we spot potential issues, the sooner we can do something about it.

So, Part 2 is  all about refining further and at the same time, revisiting the stories to get them in every team members mind. Did you know that the way the stories are written ( AS A [PERSONA] I WANT TO […] SO THAT […] ) to be optimised for sucking the information up in your brain? Like songs, we remember stories easier than de-coupled words. So I guess the next step up for remembering stories will be creating song cards, but I haven’t gone that far yet with my scrum master experiments, maybe one day 😉

Also the format is there to really make you think about why you are building what you are building, you you are creating it for and what it actually is that you are creating. This  triggers usually other areas of thoughts/requirements that might have slipped through the net if you didn’t take the trouble to write the as, what, so format. (As a scrum master, make sure that people do THINK about it, and not just use the format without thinking… trust me, it does happen…)

Do we write out the whole format on the card? No, as with everything, nothing is black and white, you need to THINK. What does my team need? Visibility, clarity and to understand the meaning behind it. If you are trying to fit AS a forgetful user I want to… on a card, it looks visually cluttered. So to fix that, I am using a visual persona ( stickfigure with a legend, most of our persona’s are re-occurring anyway so every one gets to know our actors )  I leave out or abbreviate the i want to and the so that is optional anyway, but when I use it, it gets abbreviated or replaced by an arrow ( especially when I am working with a techy  team, arrows is part of their alphabet)

Now back to phase 2 refinement.

This is what it looks like:

Agile refinement phase 2

From refinement phase 1, you got to put the stories into T-shirt sized bubbles. Now it’s time to take the relativity one step further.

For every bubble:

1. Find the smallest piece of work put it to the left of the bubble
2. Find the biggest piece of work, put it to the right of the bubble
3. Look at the other cards and put them relative to each other.

For small, you have 3 areas to use (LEFT = 1 user story point, MIDDLE = 2 user story points, RIGHT = 3 user story points)

For the others, you only have 2 columns ( LEFT and RIGHT )

Why do we have 3 options for small and less for medium (5,8), Large (13,21), XL (34,55): The smaller an item, usually, the easier it is to predict the effort so you can have more precise ranges. The more complex, the bigger the ranges ( so they can hold more diverse cards – when it comes to effort. BTW effort = TIME * people)

XL, is another kettle of fish… If an item is XL, find out why. Is it really too big or too unclear or a bit of both? Can we split it out following INVEST? If you can- do so and re-organise the cards. Will it fit into a sprint? if No, then you need to split the card even if it doesn’t follow INVEST, I know there is not a lot of info out there on these scenario’s but, Agile looks at reality, so reality needs to be reflected at all times. Use pragmatism in these cases, that has always worked well for me. But to be honest, it’s very rare that we can’t find a way following INVEST to make it fit into a sprint.

So what are the hidden gems?

• Individual level => Brain-training + efficiency training due to format of cards and repetition
• team work as always – they work together deciding smallest, biggest,… it is amazing to see a team really do this together, they form a bond!
• commitment and autonomy. The team has estimated this, it’s them saying: we can do this, and we feel confident it will take us this amount of effort. => motivation!

I hope you enjoyed this 🙂

Thank you and see you next time!

Brigitte