On thing has been bugging me for quite some time now as I observe our team at Neurobat. Most stories on our sprint board are being worked on by one developer each, leading to daily scrums where everyone reports on work that is completely independent from that of the others.

Even though we encourage people to pair program, the fact remains that most stories are such that one person can implement them by himself, with the possible exception of testing. (We have a rule that a developer may not write the acceptance tests for his own story, much less execute them.)

That, in turn, leads to a very quiet office. We work in an open-space office where the six of us are in direct line of sight of each others. Yet for most of the time, there is very little chatter as each of us is busy with “his bit”.

Perhaps Mike Cohn summarises the issue best, in his User Stories Applied:

Most user stories should be written such that they need to be worked on by more than one person, such as a user interface designer, programmer, database engineer, and a tester. If most of your stories can be completed by a single person, you should reconsider how your stories are written. Normally, this means they need to be written at a higher level so that work from multiple individuals is included with each.

I’m not a big fan of hyperbole, but this passage was a little bit of a revelation to me. Here we had been faithfully trying hard to break up stories that were too large into tiny weeny stories that could be implemented in a couple of days or two by a motivated developer; and now I’m being told that there is such a thing as a story that is too small? Talk about being in a Goldilock-ish fix.

Very well Goldilocks er… I mean Mr Cohn, I’ll bring this up at our next retrospective and we’ll see whether our stories are really too small.