Story Telling

Description

On a recent project I coached, the team was large - around 30 people.. We used cards, and followed two rules: 1. The use of fat dark magic markers for the title 2. A 5-word limit for the title

The second rule had interesting consequences - everytime folks needed more words to describe a card, it turned out the story wasn't understood well and needed clarification.

Due to the size of the team, it became necessary to be able to visually distinguish between stories across different sub-teams. This was solved by using cards of a particular color for a sub-team. In addition, tiny (but attention grabbing) stickers would be used to mark stories that had pending issues and needed to be discussed.

A problem which bogged us down for a while was not being able to effectively track which customers were responsible for signing off on tasks at the end of an iteration. Sometimes a sub-team would be the customer for another sub-team, while at other times, it would be a subject matter expert doing the honors. This was solved by recording the initials of the person(s) who would accept the task, above the Acceptance check box on the card.

After a release, the cards would be neatly stacked into a jewel box for later reference. The team had to conform to some process of requirement archiving as an organizational requirement. During the project, managers would transfer the stories into a tool the organization had purchased for the purpose.

One big reason I'd prefer index cards over a wiki is the speed of reorganization over a blank background (3M Poster/Whiteboard/Wall). I'd be done swapping two cards before I even manage to click on a wiki topic. I've often found it useful to draw connecting lines between stories that represent some kind of a connection or flow and help us understand the system better. For large teams, even providing a column for each sub-team's stories helps - you can see all the stories on one poster. The effort taken to do these on a wiki is an order of magnitude greater.

As an aside, we did use a wiki to create a searchable data dictionary.

-- SomikRaha - 20 Apr 2004