The physical manifestation of agile stories are a description of the requirement (in the form “as a [user], I want to [goal], so that [reason]”) written on an index cards with the acceptance critiera written on the reverse. The developer can pick up the card and work with it. Once the acceptance critiera are met it can be put in the pile of completed cards. If at any stage of the process we are not happy with the card, given that it is only a “promise for a conversation,” it can easily be torn up and rewritten. Tearing up cards is a powerful statement. We don’t like what we’ve written? That doesn’t matter, rip it up and start again. That works well in the opening stages of a project, but sooner or later the cards will be copied into a spreadsheet and this is where the problems start. We become attached to the story; good project management discipline demands we keep an audit trail of what we do. Suddenly it is not so easy to rip up the card. Maybe the initial story did not truly represent the requirement. More often than not the story title, and detail will remain the same, but a notes column will be spawned in the spreadsheet and the change to the story will be entered as narative in this column.
And then in the comments:
One advantage of copying the cards to a wiki if you need to access them remotely, rather than using a spreadsheet is that you can delete and rewrite them to your heart’s content, and the page’s history is your audit trail. We all know that no-one will ever look, but at least you can reassure people that the history isn’t lost, and because it happens automatically there’s no overhead. We tend to keep the bare minimum (title, estimate and a few notes) on the index cards, and put the expanded information, including acceptance criteria, on the release plan wiki page. Apart from anything else, the less you write on the cards, the less reluctant you are to tear them up if they need changing.
Getting Attached to Stories by DancingMango
I shall be interested to see how the issues around impermanence resolve themselves in our case. There is such a tension between official audit trails and the physical impermanence of story cards.
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