[Sigia-l] Agile, Scrum and UX?

[Matthew Hodgson]

Scrum requires all User Stories are done in the Sprint. The Scrum Master's
role is to reinforce this rule (they "own" the rules) and its process.
Sprint Planning is designed to allow time to have just enough of a
discussion to understand the size of a User Story, to break it down, and
agree (as a baseline) on how the team will approach its delivery. If UX is
required as part of the delivery of the User Story, I'd expect a discussion
on how much is needed to create a usable, accessible, lovable result, not a
minimal effort as part of an MVP.

There are lots of ways to slice a story. Sometimes the team doesn't agree
on how. Devs tend to want to separate out the front end from the backend,
but this is an anti-pattern. I find having done user journeys or story
mapping provides a useful user focussed perspective on slicing. You
ultimately want to slice a story so that it represents the smallest unit of
value to the user in a way that enables it to be delivered in 1-2 days (in
its entirety) by the team. This may mean a page of many features gets
broken down into smaller sets of features.

If it's clear that there is still no agreement, the SM will park the
discussion, the User Story will be put aside til next Sprint, and the team
will spend time (Backlog Refinement) doing some analysis and draft design
on the User Story until clarity is achieved. Sometimes, as a coach, I end
up making the decision on how to best slice a User Story because a team
typically has very little experience in knowing how best to do this. There
are dozens of patterns to use, but knowing which is a good one to apply
(there is never one "best" way) takes experience.

Sometimes there might be a User Story left over from a previous Sprint that
the team needs to work on, but if the rule of is that all User Stories must
be finished in a single Sprint, then Sprint Planning and Backlog Refinement
are mechanisms to ensure that all User Stories are sliced into small
pieces. This is just application of Batch Theory.


On 22 March 2015 at 03:54, Jonathan Baker-Bates <jonathan at bakerbates.com>
wrote:

>
> One of the major problems I've found with sprint-based activity is
> when team members can't (or won't) do UX work because they're working
> to deliver their part on stories from a previous sprint. I take it
> that you prevent this by making sure all stories are done in a single
> sprint, is that right? Does that not lead to endless discussions about
> how to cut stories down to fit though?
>