Working on the Agile model gives you enhanced visibility on the progress of the project. Though it still requires you to be plugged into the requirements it quickly dawns upon you that the key to make this work, is the size of the individual stories. The story size holds the key for the quicker turnaround of feature.
Working along my first Agile project, I came across the Personal Kanban blog by Jim Benson. Jim’s blog helps you relate Kanban based development much better since you start applying it to your routine daily tasks. You appreciate the benefits because you understand the stories better than the stories/requirements in a project.
The biggest draw for me to apply the personal Kanban for my daily tasks was the clarity I was hoping to get. Clarity in terms of Visibility of stories, Bottlenecks and patterns for the bottlenecks.
Equipped with ‘Agile Zen’ I started adding stories to my process flow. Initially some of the stories were just tasks and they looked a lot easier to move them across. As I moved along, some of the other stories were a little bit more complex and I started observing that they were piling up in my ‘Working’ stage. I was also feeling frustrated since I was moving the tasks back & forth.
A quick analysis showed that the stories that were taking longer to complete weren’t simple stories and they served to represent a collection of smaller stories, though all of them were related. Take for example ‘Preparing for hosting an event’. Though there were many tasks in them grouping all of them will mean you loose focus on this story.(Ofcourse there were some simpler stories that didnt move as well. But isnt the goal of my Personal Kanba to throw some light into this aspect as well?)
Some of these complex stories had dependencies and unless those dependent stories were sorted out, it was difficult to move these complex stories.
On a Kanban based system – which applies to regular continous stream of work you break the Iteration or Sprint mould to model the flow of the work that comes in. In the absence of any such timeline constraints its very important to maintain the flow of the system. Otherwise you start to see stories piling up in your “Inprocess” queue. If you set an WIP limit you quickly run into dead lock issues.
Complex & larger stories will not enable flow in your system. Hence its very important to keep the size of the stories at a very manageable level. What is that size? That depends on what you can do in a day. For my domestic chores I look at stories that can be done in a day. However it also pays to ensure that the stories help you relate a completion of a job. Call it a feature in Software Development?
