Last Updated Jun 19, 2012 — Enterprise Agile Planning expert
Enterprise Agile Planning

Your Scrum Team has been hired by a physical fitness expert to develop a mobile device application to prescribe daily personalized exercise routines and diets for a wide range of people. The app should adapt the routines to users’ fitness goals, current health, age, gender, preferences, food allergies, lifestyle, etc.

The fitness expert is excited about all the possibilities of this app but promised a key user a working system in 30 days.

The main feature of the system will be this epic:

Generate Anyone’s Exercise Routine and Diet

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Extract stories from the “Generate Anyone’s Exercise Routine and Diet” epic and write them out as new stories. For now it’s OK for the stories to overlap or contradict each other — we’re looking for 15 different ways to make an initial vertical slice. In each case, be prepared to explain why the extracted story is smaller than the original epic.

  1. Extract a smaller story by focusing on a particular user role or persona. (“Prioritize your users first, then your user stories.” — Jeff Patton) E.g.: “first time user,” “social networker,” “my mom,” etc.
  2. Extract a smaller story by substituting basic utility for usability. (First make it work, then make it pretty.)
  3. Extract a smaller story by splitting on CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) boundaries.
  4. Extract a smaller story by focusing on distinct scenarios, such as the “happy path” (main success scenario) vs. alternate (exception) flows.
  5. Extract a smaller story by focusing on a simplified data set.
  6. Extract a smaller story by focusing on a simplified algorithm.
  7. Extract a smaller story by buying some component(s) instead of building everything yourself.
  8. Extract a smaller story by discarding technologies that increase hassle, dependency, and vendor lock.
  9. Extract a smaller story by substituting some manual processes for full automation.
  10. Extract a smaller story by substituting batch processing for online processing.
  11. Extract a smaller story by substituting generic for custom.
  12. Extract a smaller story by reducing supported hardware/OS/client platforms.
  13. Extract a smaller story from the acceptance criteria of another story.
  14. Extract a smaller story by substituting “1” for “all.” (NOTE: Look for implied instances of “all,” as the word often won’t be written explicitly.)
  15. Extract a smaller story by scanning for keywords such as “and,” “or,” periods, and other kinds of separators.

This exercise uses ideas by Bill Wake, Lasse Koskela, Mark Levison, and Jeff Patton. This is stuff I’ve seen work, but I’ve probably twisted their ideas in ways they may or may not agree with. To read what they have to say, see:

–mj
(Michael)

Watch an example Backlog Grooming Meeting.
Read a 6-page illustrated Scrum Reference Card.

Are you ready to scale your enterprise?

Explore

What's New In The World of Digital.ai

May 19, 2023

What is SAFe PI Planning?

PI Planning aims to bring together all the people doing the work and empower them to plan, estimate, innovate, and commit to work that aligns with the business’s high-level goals, vision, and strategy.

Learn More
July 5, 2022

How to bring external data to Digital.ai Agility

Silvia Davis, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Digital.ai, tells her story of how a positive app experience led to the realization that proper data integration is essential to the entire application lifecycle.
Key points:  
– Product managers, portfolio managers, and scrum masters need visibility in the entire application lifecycle to avoid risks of application delivery delays.  
– Integration between Digital.ai Agility and other application development tools is an essential element in getting visibility within the whole application lifecycle.  
– Agility has out-of-the-box connectors to other application development tools via marketplace, and an API, allowing customers and partners to quickly create integrations with their own application’s ecosystem. 

Learn More
April 19, 2022

Happy Anniversary Digital.ai!

This year, Digital.ai turns two! Continue reading for insight on Digital.ai’s journey and what plans we have for the future.

Learn More