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    User Story Management Between Iterations...
    Question posted 8/13/08 by BrianNeiman , tagged Process guidance
    1971 Views, 5 Comments
    Title:
    User Story Management Between Iterations...
    Question:

    Lets say we have User Story 20 (US20). It contains details on screen design, contents and layout. US20 is part of Iteration 1. We finish up Iteration 1. We now have learned more and want to add / refine US20. Do we mark US20 "Complete" and create a new User Story or do we add additonal updates/details to US20, mark it's state "In-Progress" and move it to a subsequent Iteration ?

    Comments

    • posted 8/13/08 by BrianNeiman

      My thinking is that if a new User Story is created, and US20 is marked "Complete", there may be information/contents (notes, attachments, test cases, etc.) in US20 which if not copied, added...to the new User Story (which would be a continuation of US20), there could be valuable information that would be lost / omitted and future testing may miss something of importance.

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    • posted 8/14/08 by Ronica

      The best to way to retain that information might be to make the new story and US20 have the same parent, and include notes on the new story (in notes field or desc field) to remind folks to reference US20.

      The reason to create a new story is simply this:

      • Our goal in Agile is to learn. Many, many stories would get "undone" if we thought of it that way. We are always learning.
      • We don't want to penalize people for not thinking of everything up front. To take away completion/acceptance would make people nervous to just "do it". They would always be wanting to wait to "be sure".
      • As a practical tool matter: The team would appear to have a lowered velocity, because US20 would have been committed to but not accepted. It works that way because of the two bullets above.

      Hope that helps.

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    • posted 10/2/08 by Andrew Montalenti

      I ran into this same issue.  My solution was to do this:

      1. Click on US20 and choose the "Split..." action.  Split the tasks that did not get done into a new User Story, and create any new tasks in that new story.

      2. Go to the new story (let's say it created US51), and then click on "Predecessors".  Click "Add Predecessor..." and add US20 as a predecessor.  This creates a link between the stories that will be viewable in both Iteration Status views (for the old and new Iteration).  You see it as a little icon with an arrow next to the item state.

      I believe that step 2 should happen automatically when splitting a story, and I will submit this as a feature request.  Does anyone else agree with me?

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    • posted 10/2/08 by Andrew Montalenti

      OK, I created a feature request for the above.  Vote on it if you agree.

      Here's the link

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    • posted 11/17/08 by Howard Dunlavy

      I am running into this a lot with my team right now also.    What I have been doing is creating a second story (as suggested by Ronica), moving over the appropriate tasks, and then creating a common parent story.  The advantage of this approach is that it will show the multiple stories as a single "Work Product" in the dashboard.  I like this Work Product dashboard because I have it structured to show the major features in a release, the items that we would list on release notes.

      The idea of using a Predecessor concept is interesting.  I had not really come up with any usage scenarios for the Predecessor capability before.  I wonder how this would show up in the Work Products dashboard?

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