Your Customer’s Perspective Matters the Most
If you are a Scrum practitioner, it’s very likely that you split your stories to make them fit into a sprint. And this activity is something that you need to pay careful attention to.
Always think about story splitting from a client’s perspective. Put yourself in their shoes. When you split your stories, ask yourself “What is the most feasible option that will still solve my customer’s problem?”. That should always be your starting point. The stories on your kanban board should represent work items that are first and foremost meaningful to the customer.
Now you might be thinking “Sonya, you can’t always deliver items that are meaningful to the customer in every sprint”. Let’s break this statement down.
Let’s assume you are a software development agency and you have to develop a payment portal. Can you provide the user interface so your customer can see how they will interact with your solution? Or is it possible to provide credit card payment integration first before jumping into Wire Transfer, PayPal or Bitcoin support?
What about all the components behind the scene? Does your customer care or not whether you have set up routers and load balancers?
I started my career as a software developer, and if you’d asked me 15 years ago I would probably have said, “No, why would the customer care about the backend implementation?”
A load balancer acts as the “traffic cop” sitting in front of your servers and routing client requests across all the servers capable of fulfilling those requests in a manner that maximizes speed and capacity utilization and ensures that no one server is overworked, which could degrade performance.
Let’s rephrase the question a bit: Does your customer care whether your solution is fast, cost-effective and reliable? Well, definitely “Yes”. Therefore, setting up routers and load balancers is meaningful for your customers.
When you’re splitting your stories, think about what is the easiest and fastest way to provide a deliverable to your clients. The goal is to deliver results and collect their feedback sooner so you can adjust your course accordingly.
The nature of knowledge work is unpredictable. In knowledge work, we make assumptions about the future. In the most effective manner, we validate these assumptions by delivering results early and often. We learn what brings value and avoid the risk of spending time and effort on the wrong things.
You Should Split Your Stories in a Continuous Manner
Splitting your stories is a continuous process. It’s not something that happens before the work moves through the process.
As your team works through a story in the development workflow, you gain more and more information. If it happens that the story turned out to be way more complicated than you initially assumed, it’s imperative to ask the question: Is it possible to break down this story so we can actually deliver something to our customers to solve their problems in a timely manner?
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