A few years ago, I was chatting with a senior developer about Robert C. ‘Uncle Bob’ Martin and the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP). It struck me that the principle might not just apply to software design, but could also be a useful way to think about writing agile user stories.
So I’ve been sitting with the question: should user stories follow the Single Responsibility Principle too?
Continue reading Should agile user stories follow the Single Responsibility Principle?
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the size of user stories in agile projects. The idea that I’ve been reflecting on is what if teams only worked with small, similarly-sized pieces of work, rather than exponentially larger blocks of work?
In theory, small user stories should be more predictable, should include less risk, less uncertainty and less complexity. They should, therefore, take less time to complete than larger user stories… you would think! Or as Mike Cohn put it in Agile Estimating and Planning (Prentice Hall, 2006), “small stories keep work flowing”.
Continue reading The importance of small user stories