User Story and a Passenger

I was having a chat with Kabir in my team on the train, and he brought up the concept of "waiting room" that is used in the agile world to park a user story that is not yet "defined" to an extent that it can be taken up for development. The user story may be needing a spike to evaluate feasibility or not defined enough to roll it into an iteration. The concept in itself is a great one, but when I was linking this back to the Agile train, it dawned on me that User Stories can infact be compared to a Passenger and the more the passengers, the more the scope that gets delivered. Bingo!

When you extend this, you will also realize the need to have stations go through the steps of Initial, Defined, Planned, Completed and Accepted. The faster you get a passenger to Accpeted, the better your 'velocity' will be.

A person outside the train can actually see the train delivering goods and its ability to to reach destination within the specified timeline. The dashboard will infact be a dashboard of a car helping you look at various views of how much goods is being delivered and if the consignment expected next will be coming on time.

It is also possible to see the trains velocity and see if it is well oiled and any impediments are removed. The impediments in terms of getting accepted ranges from (a) breaking an existing functionality (b) not coding to the new functionality completely (c) breaking during integration (d) breaking during integrated build (e) breaking during deployment (f) breaking during complete regression (g) breaking during tech stack verification before it actually hits Product Test groups to evaluate. It is important for the teams outside the train to have a view of this and ensure there are enough safety nets built to help accelerate the train.

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