Breakdown Task

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Case Study:

Our team is about to try and breakdown several big pieces of work. We have never been successful at creating stories that are vertical slices that can be worked on in parallel by team members. So what happens is we each get our own epic to chip away at and we never finish anything in our sprint that is a deliverable piece. We want to move towards limiting our WIP to a couple of epics to work on that will get completed to DoD within 2 sprints. So everyone chips (even not in their areas of expertise) in to get these completed. My question is what are the best questions to ask the PO to get this done.

-- Anonymous

Suggestion:

Its hard to make concrete recommendations without seeing what the epics look like. But what i often see in this case is teams taking too broad a view of what it means for something to be done. They often believe that the feature needs to be completely production ready within a sprint. I suggest working with the PO to define an MVP for the epic and start there. This MVP may not actually be something you would put into production but it should be able to run as if it were in production. It also should validate a piece of the feature. For example if you are building a form on a website, the critical piece for an MVP may be that you can submit data from a page through an API and get it into the database. So the first MVP story may be to create one DB table, one simple API method and a very simple web form with one field. if that works you can then layer on the rest of the fields, strict form validation, api security, etc, in subsequent stories.

-- Brian