What Happens if a User Story Gets Bigger?

When User Stories Get Bigger

We have all been in the situation; you discuss a user story, you have a pretty good understanding of how it needs to be implemented in the system. Then when you start to work on it, you realise more work needs to be done.

Its a common practice, when you originally estimate its at a pretty high level, then when you actually get into the detail and further clarifications are made — scope can often increase.

Mitigating the Risk

A good technique that I have used many times is to create a checklist of areas to consider each time you estimate. This would be a living list which would grow as new considerations come up during the sprint, each time a user stories estimate grows…. ask why this is.

Each time you split a user story and estimate it, you can refer to this list then to mitigate the risk of your user stories growing. Sometimes it will be a one off, a new area that you have not touched on or considered in the past, but sometimes it can be from a consistent pattern that should be addressed.

To create the initial list, you should refer to your definition of done. If one of the things on your list is documentation for example — you should ask yourself “Have we considered the impact of documentation?”, “Has any similar documentation been created” or “Is this a case of just updating existing documentation?”.

When you are going through your user stories and estimating them, have the list somewhere clear for everyone to see. This could be a poster on a wall or print outs that everyone can see when going through the process.

By identifying and tracking these, hopefully you will be able to reduce the amount of times that your user stores grow in estimate during a sprint.

This post was originally posted on: theproducthub.io
https://www.theproducthub.io/2021/01/03/failing-at-scrum/
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About the Author

Ashley-Christian Hardy
theproducthub.io

Product Leader. Over 10 years in product development; with experience in product management, UX & UI, product design, product & delivery methodologies and product leadership. A strong advocate in innovation, experimentation and building great products with the use of qualitative and quantitative research, putting an emphasis on a customer centric design and approach.

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