Discovery to Implementation Story revision management

Question

Hi All,

Context:

Our organisation is a adopting Agile. We are using JIRA. I am working as a Lead BA for a Project that is coming out of discovery to Implementation. In Discovery we identified, few EPICs such as Search, View, Template Management etc. to align with high level capabilities. Under those EPICS, we created stories. In discovery those stories were  at a high level and not elaborated fully. Team recorded their estimates in story points in JIRA to support MVP definition and estimation process. So far so good.

Situation:

Now we are moving to implementation and as per my Scrum master, the stories must be brought down to the level where developers and testers can pick up. In waterfall world, these are system level requirements which is a lower level of business requirements done during Discovery. So I am experiencing that the stories in Discovery had to be reshaped a little with POs and sometime needs to be split up to align with how the requirements are going to be implemented in system.

Problem Definition:

1) My main worry is how the Story points applied at Discovery are gonna workout when I split the stories and how my burn up with work.

2) Am I missing a step in requirement management i.e. business requirements to system requirement. But I don't see any option of business - System story etc. Perhaps my company does not have right plug ins.

If you can shed any light or point me in some direction where I can find answers to these questions that shall be great.

Best Regards

Sumit

Sumit Talwar_xyln5e · Answer

Thanks Marcin for your valuable comments.

I see only small challenge to both, hence my concerns and queries

1) I cannot define the stories to nth level of detail during discovery. In my view we should not because then we will move into waterfall. so estimations are done at high level. yes i agree that we have to re-do estimation but then i would have to provide a ball park estimation at start.

just before the sprint starts, we redo estimation to elaborated story.

but between these some time the story gets split to 2-3 stories to align with system and this transition from business to system is causing a challenge

2) i would accept your approach as this could be an option. Only challenge in my organisation is that I don't control the creation of projects.

I am now looking at using IssueType = "Features" and "Improvements" as an intermediate step to define business requirements and then use story. Hopefully something will work out.

Thanks for your replies again. Very helpful.

Sumit

Marcin Żurawiecki · Answer

Hello @Sumit Talwar

I work in this, let's say orthodox version of Scrum i.e. all features of the framework included. Here are my thoughts on your problems:

1) If you want to make it right, you have to reestimate your stories after all the splitting and defining the details is done. Now you have full information about what needs to be accomplished in every story and estimation should be based on this data. We never estimate high level stories. When a story heads to the top of the backlog, we are doing a backlog refinement meeting and describe stories in more detail, so that we can estimate them.

2) You can try to use another project in Jira for storing your business requirements and link them with corresponding stories from your development project. Confluence also can be an option if you prefer to store your business requirements as documents rather than issues. We are storing only stories. As I said, at the early stage those stories might not be elaborated in detail, but it happens over time.

Kind regards,
Marcin