Do You Really Need Story Points?

To the Point

Instead of wasting time estimating story points, spend that precious time understanding the requirements. Figure out how to break them down into smaller and more valuable stories, and deliver less volume and higher impact.

Base all of your work and planning around small stories. Your predictability will increase. Your customers will get more frequent deliveries of truly valuable functionality. And you will have an overall happier and more engaged development team.

What do Story Points Provide Your Team?

If you are using story points:

  • Did you ever ask why?
  • Did you ever track the accuracy?
  • Or ever track the consistency of story points to any other metric?
  • Have you ever considered the effort required to guess at the story points?
  • What is the return on investment of the time spent generating a guess of dubious accuracy?
  • Do customers ask for Story Points?

The primary reason that Ron Jeffries and the XP team pivoted from estimating in ideal hours or ideal days was because of the confusion this practice caused. The unit of measure was well understood by business people. But the concept of “ideal days” was not. So turning to a made-up value and calling it “points” was a way to discourage the business folks from wondering how a three-(ideal)day effort required a week of calendar time.

Though Scrum does not dictate using Story Points, it seems everybody does so.

The Problems with Story Points

The problems I see with Story Points

  • The fact that people use numbers gives an illusion of “we know what we are doing, we have a precise metric.” No matter if you pull out the “but we are using a Fibonacci sequence” – that just exaggerates the degree of imprecision.
  • No two teams – maybe, even, no two people – have the same Story Point “Ruler.”
    • Yes, I know we can pick a well-known story as a 1 pointer and do relative sizing…
    • And I know we can work to make all teams estimate story points the same way. Hogwash.
  • The activity rarely (never?) reduces the scope
  • Estimation is usually coupled with a capacity planning session, further deepening the impact of imprecision on the overall process
  • The ceremonies around estimation sessions often miss the point – we are here to understand what needs to be delivered to the user.
    • Instead, the Scrum Master diligently asks for Story Point estimates for the story as written in Jira (because the business is too busy)
      • They get (3,3,3,3,5,5,5) from the team members.
      • They then proceed to ask one of the low number people (a 3) to defend their score, and one with the high number (a 5) to defend their score.
      • Once again the dogmatic ceremonies deliver low-value results
    • Yes, I know there are anecdotes of well-run ceremonies
  • NEWS FLASH – you still need to break down the work into meaningful, smaller features. Or at least you should.

A No Story Point Strategy

I have a different strategy.

We deliver features (aka, stories) that customers value. No customer is asking for more story points.

It is better to expend the “story-pointing” energy in breaking down the stories into smaller features. Along the way, we even learn more about the actual needs of the users, and we can frequently find ways to produce more value for less effort by cutting or delaying scope. We do this by bringing the business/subject matter experts, QA, development, and UX, into the conversations. We collaborate to deliver the highest value issues for the least effort. We use story mapping to help defer scope to later releases (or never).

We track completed features delivered.

It turns out to be a pretty stable metric over time – if you maintain the discipline.

If you also track the features you want to build for a given version release (as shown in the graphic), you can get a pretty good handle on time ranges.

(Ab)Using Jira Story Points

I have abused the Story Point field in Jira by setting it up as a signal to the team about simplicity:

  • 1 – super easy, maybe a day or two of work
  • 2 – A bit more complicated, could be a few days, maybe 4
  • 3 – these are never allowed to last long; they must be broken down! They can never be pulled into the “selected for development” column.

The reason I put simplistic values in the field is to allow us to get some Jira reports that use Story Points.

For example, look how we can guess when the release date will be for the set of issues!

Freedom

Try out the strategy of breaking down all features into small, client-valued stories, Make all issues a 1 or a 2 pointer.

If you aren’t reducing (or delaying) scope along the way, you might be doing it wrong.

Remove the ceremonies around story points and base all of your predictions on issues delivered.

Hard to Capture Fluid Agile Practices in a Static Graph

Well, this is sort of what I like to do on software development projects…

I feel like there are some necessary startup processes to get you up and running quickly with a glimpse or vision of the product/end goal. And then some set of similar, or refined,  or slightly modified practices that carry on during the life of the main product development period. I liken it to getting the skeleton up and running, or the “tree trunk and main branches” upon which we can rapidly build out the app.

This was part of a “Day of Agile” immersion course where the attendees step through a mock development project…

PDF: Iterative Development Path Agenda.

PNG: Iterative Development Path

 

So You Wanna Try Agile?

Well, in a nutshelll, agile is a state of mind.
Agile is relative.
Agile is not dogmatic.
Agile is pragmatic.

Agile is designed to reduce the gap in time between doing something, and seeing a result that you can “measure.”

Blend in Lean concepts.
Read The Goal.
Don’t do giant monolithic things.
Learn how to decompose your “features/expected outcomes” into bite-size chunks.
Don’t plan across a far horizon to the same degree.
What folks are tasked with doing today better be clear and have unambiguous meaning of “DONE”
What folks are tasked with doing in 2 months better be rather nebulous and broad.

Don’t be complacent and relax.
Question the value of deliverables that are needed to fulfill some process step for some other team.
Ask any downstream recipient what they truly need — and why.
Try new processes.
Reflect.
Agile takes constant effort and constant partial attention if you are doing it right.
Be holistic.

Prefer Explicit Cucumber Tests

Leave a reply

An Inexact Test

Innocently enough, one of our developers added this feature, which passes:

  Scenario: Create Field
    When I manage the "acme" org
    And I go to the user field management list for "acme"
    And I click "New"
    And I set the following values
      | Name     | Test Field |
      | Required | true       |
    And I click the "Create" button
    Then I should see "Test Field"
    And I should see "test_field"
    And I should see "Yes"

Note: for now I am not going to discuss the other improvements that could be done with this feature (e.g., to remove the “click” steps).

Unfortunately, the actual page looked as follows (using save and open page):

Name        Required?  Key 	
First name  Yes        first_name
Last name   Yes        last_name
Test Field  No         test_field

Sure enough, the text “Yes” was indeed on the page, given the step was defined simply as shown below. However, the intent of the test was actually not correctly followed in the code.

Then(/^I should see "(.*?)"$/) do |text|
  expect(page).to have_text(text)
end

An Explicit Test

So one way to ensure the proper data appears in the proper place on the page, especially when it is in a table, is to do the following.

Add an ID to the page location:

    %table
      %thead
        %tr
          %th.text-center Name
          %th.text-center Required?
          %th.text-center Key
          %th.text-center
      %tbody
        - user_fields.each do |field|
          %tr{id: dom_id(field)}
            %td.text-center= field.name
            %td.text-center
              -if field.required
                Yes
              -else
                No
            %td.text-center= field.key

Change the feature to expect the text exists in the context of the record:

  Scenario: Create New Field
    Given I follow "User Fields" in the sidebar
    And I follow "New Field"
    And I set the following values
      | Name     | Zodiac Sign |
      | Required | true        |
    And I click the "Create" button
    And I should see the following user field:
      | name        | required | key         |
      | Zodiac Sign | Yes      | zodiac_sign |

And define a step something like this:

Then(/^I should see the following user field:$/) do |table|
  # table is a table.hashes.keys # => [:name, :required, :key]
  field = UserField.find_by(name: field_name)
  dom_id = "user_field_#{field._id}"
  table.hashes.each do |row|
    dom_id = dom_id_for_field(row[:name])
    within("tr##{dom_id}") do
      expect(page).to have_text(row[:key])
      expect(page).to have_text(row[:required])
    end
  end
end

Test Your Test!

I also like to check my tests! That is, go to the code where the text “Yes” is defined, and change it to something else. If your tests still pass, you know your test is flawed!

Summary

By adding a “findable” id to the output, you can more exclusively assert some text is on the page in the correct location!

Other approaches

  • ensure you eliminate the other non-essential elements from the page, so there are no “false positives”
  • Check for a very bizarre string that will not accidentally appear, like “Zebra Fangs”

 

User Stories and FDD

FDD?

I bet you never heard of Feature-Driven Development, eh?

Well, Mike Cohn wrote this recent post:

Not Everything Needs to Be a User Story: Using FDD Features

Having worked with Peter Coad since the early 90s, and Jeff De Luca in the late 90s, I’ve been a fan of FDD and naturally turn to that style when “user stories” are not so user-centric. And yes, those are typically the minority items on our backlogs.

Software development is working through a prioritized to-do list. Most of the to-dos should be about addressing user needs. Call them user stories, call them features, maybe even call them requirements. Whatever works best to help you organize and communicate what needs to be built.

Another element of FDD is breaking down (or building up) the system into

  • Major Feature Sets (Quote Management), and their
    • Feature Sets (Clone Quotes, Create Quotation Documents), and their
      • Features (create a quote, edit a quote, archive a quote).

Major Feature Sets might loosely equate to epics 🙂

One of the keys to successful software development, is to combine the list of features with a domain model (and some UI mockups don’t hurt). The domain model need not be to the nth degree of UML detail. But one that clearly describes — in just enough detail — what your problem domain is all about. This eliminates the need to write all sorts of detail in the development issues, leaving that to the model. Then the feature list become more about the order in which we are building up various aspects of the product feature sets.

Thanks for paying a bit of homage to FDD. A blast from the past!

Zurb Magellan Navigation

Love the Zurb Foundation stuff. Love that they freely open-source these cool tools and provide documentation to the community. So, it is hard to complain about “free.” But, in the spirit of community, I think our frustration is often due to being excited about trying out a new, cool, thing, and getting bummed out when running into small roadblocks. (Especially for me, a hacker, who is not really qualified to jump in and discover some crazy cascading javascript or CSS explanation for the odd behavior.)

The disjointed and terse example on the Magellan docs page does leave one asking for more details.

Disjointed example:

  • Arrivals (build, js)
  • Destinations (arrival, destination)
   
  
Arrival

  
  
Destination

I had a great deal of trouble to get the nesting correct on my page that also included the topbar element. There seemed to be conflicts with having the topbar being contain-to-grid and fixed.

From what I have gleaned by looking at the page source and doing a lot of trial and error (:boom:), I got something to work “good enough” (as I got tired of the trial and error):

  • In one div, define the arrivals
  • Later in the page, define the matching destinations
  • And fiddle around with divs, nesting, classes, until it works the way you like

An example in haml (sorry for not doing it in HTML, but this is ripped from an app I am writing — modified slightly for this post):

- structure_elements = %w(Access Interior Roof Shutoff Drain FloorPlan SiteDetails)
- structure = @structure

%div{"data-magellan-expedition" => "fixed"}
  %dl.sub-nav
    - structure_elements.each do |element|
      %dd{"data-magellan-arrival" => element}
        = link_to element, "##{element}"
%article#structure
  %h4
    = link_to structure.name, edit_structure_path(structure)
    = link_to fa_icon('pencil'), edit_structure_path(structure)
%hr
= render partial: 'photos/photos', locals: {context: structure, preplan: preplan}
- structure_elements.each do |element|
  %a{name: element}
  %h3{"data-magellan-destination" => element}
    = element
  %div.panel
    ="#{Faker::Lorem.paragraphs(3).join(' ')}"

I hope this helps :heart_eyes_cat:

 

 

Kaminari Paging and Zurb Foundation

I am using Kaminari paging gem and Zurb Foundation 5, and here is what I did to make them work together in HAML fashion:

If you generate the theme (it might not matter which one), for example:

rails g kaminari:views bootstrap

You can see all of the “machinery” in the viewskaminari folder. Here is my “hack” to get Foundations Pagination working with Kaminari:

I tweaked _paginator.html.haml to reflect the Foundation class on the %ul tag:

= paginator.render do
  %ul.pagination
  ...

And I tweaked _page.html.haml to reflect Foundations current class (instead of Kaminari’s active class):

%li{class: "#{'current' if page.current?}"}

And then it just worked!

Kaminari and Foundation Paging

Kaminari and Foundation Paging

A Fool with a Tool

One of my quips that people seem to get a kick out of is:

“A fool with a tool is still a fool”

My point is simple: woodworking tools in the hands of craftsmen can produce fine furniture or musical instruments. But merely the availability of great tools “doth not a masterpiece make.” Not to take the woodworking analogy too far, but power tools can also make it easier for the amateur to get hurt.

The reason a quality piece can be turned out more efficiently with a tool is the ability for the craftsmen to more quickly realize the design and architecture. In addition, tools can help make patterns easier to replicate. From actual patterns (like certain cross-section shapes on molding), to templates (like violin bodies), to connectors (like Kreg pocket hole jigs). A woodworking shop will also make good use of building components to put into larger assemblies.

So, tools in the hands of experts can help realize the design. Tools that are able to help apprentices produce parts designed by the masters, can help produce more output and help train the apprentices.

But put me in a room with the most awesome woodworking tools, and I will not be producing Stradivarius-esque violins any time soon (or ever, most likely).