Multi-Part Stories?

Jim Standley <[email protected]> Tue, 25 Feb 2003 21:13:08 -0500
Newsgroups gmane.comp.programming.extreme-programming.adoption
Message-ID <[email protected]>
We're having pretty good luck using story sized chunks to plan and develop 
frequent, small iterations. But we run into trouble with stories that take 
a lot of coordination with other groups. For example, a story might say 
"display annuity contract data on coverage page".  The page already shows 
other products, so this is a "more of the same" kind of enhancement as far 
as the users are concerned.

But you cannot just find a pair and code this sucker up.  The steps are 
more like:

1) Have the conversations with business users as promised by the story
2) Work with legacy team to establish input and output structures for a new 
service
3) Work with the middleware team to establish message queues, 
transformation rules, etc.
4) Wait a couple weeks for the legacy programs and middleware plumbing to 
be working
5) Find a pair and code the sucker up. It's an N-Tier app with very 
different skills in each tier, so this takes coordination between tiers, 
but when we finally get to coding, we're pretty good.

We tried saying this was a long running story, much longer than most that 
fit in a single iteration, and reporting status that this part is done, now 
this part, now we're waiting, etc. But that's exactly the kind of waterfall 
schedule and invisible progress (or not) that we started using stories to 
get rid of.

Any suggestions how to make stories that deliver something every iteration, 
that can be honestly tracked?  Building the UI with stubbed data is 
sometimes successful, but not always practical.


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