Story Cards

Story cards play a central role in our projects. They are 5x7” cards that contain:

The Story Name
Description
Notes
User priority
User risk
Development effort
Technical risk
A set of actions required/remaining to complete the development of the story

The cards deliberately have been kept small in order to limit the amount of information that can put on the card.

The first step of the initial discovery phase is to create single story card that describes the new system at a very high level. Theoretically, the technical team is supposed to estimate the development effort for that card. Any time a story estimate is more than two days (as it would be for the first story), that story must be decomposed into smaller stories. So, story cards would be developed for each functional area of the system and ordered by user priority: the lower priority cards are put aside to enable the team to focus on the higher priority stories.

New estimates would be required for the new stories and the process of prioritizing, culling and decomposing stories into smaller stories would be repeated. Although the stories come primarily from the business users, there will be stories from other stakeholders: the IT department may require that IT standards or guidelines be followed, that certain technology is used, or that specific documentation or training is provided; the technical staff might identify the need for a database, for specific software or hardware, for a suitable project work area, or even for suitable programmer energy sources (e.g. Jolt).

At the end of the initial discovery phase, there will exist a pile of story cards that will describe the new system. The lower priority stories will not have been decomposed and will have large development efforts and high technical risks. The higher user priority stories will be more decomposed and there should be some stories with a high user priority, a low technical risk and a development estimate that is less than one week.

The plans for the first iteration will draw from these stories. Subsequent iterations will draw from the left over stories and any new stories that have been discovered during the iteration. Now we can give a precise definition of an iteration.