This is a diagram I have created to illustrate a potential life cycle for a User Story, as well as how the Agile planning levels relate to the clarity of a User Story at different stages.
The italicized text attempts to answer the question “When does this phase typically happen?”
As in all things Agile, there is no one size fits all solution, so you’d need to tailor this to your organization and your team. My contention is that most User Stories go through all of the phases/levels whether you consciously realize it or not.
You can also download a PDF version of the diagram.
Filed under: Product Backlog, Product Backlog Grooming, Product Owner Tips, Release Planning, Scrum, ScrumMaster Tips, User Stories
Nice take on visualizing the story life cycle.
However, to me it doesn’t really show that typically at “roadmap level” a “story” is more like an “epic” and is then broken down into multiple stories during grooming.
One thing that also looks a bit ambiguous to me is the last stage of “Death & Legacy Level”. I assume this is when the story is almost forgotten and the test suite secures that noone breaks it in the future. I think the text “when automated tests run” is misleading, since automated tests should already be green before the product owner can accept the story. A better wording might be “regression tests run”.
Apart from that, as I said: nice illustration.
Matthias,
Thanks for the comments. Your comment about epics and story breakdown is one that I’ve received from other reviewers, so resolving that challenge is high on my backlog for the next evolution on this topic. I’m thinking that I’ll make another visual that follows an example user story from epic, to theme, to individual stories just as you suggest. The one thing I always find challenging about writing about user stories is that user stories should be a collaborative/ conversational/verbal activity that involves so much team/org context, so it’s hard to describe that collaboration in prose. The best thing I’ve come up with so far is the “User Story Utopia” script, which tells the story of a a backlog grooming session in the form of a script for a play. You can find it here:
http://www.scrumcrazy.com/file/view/Script_UserStoryUtopia.pdf
(I’m hoping to someday get this made into a video that I can post on YouTube — just need some actors and/or agilists to get together and film it)
Wrt the Death and Legacy level, I think you have hit on something that I didn’t see, but I completely agree with now that you point it out. Getting the view of others is always a great thing. I’ll put this on the backlog as well because that needs to be remedied.