Epic Fail
Part of #UserStoryAntiPatterns
Problem
There are large, loosely defined ideas that the team want to consider for development later.
Context
- The team use fixed-length sprints or iterations
Forces
- The team must define a 6-12 month delivery roadmap
- The organisation has an annual budgeting cycle
Supposed Solution
The team introduces a backlog hierarchy with a category above User Stories. These items represent things that will be worked on in the future roadmap. They are estimated and tracked independently so the rest of the organisation can plan appropriately.
Resulting Context
- The team wastes time and effort tracking and deciding what type of backlog item something is.
- Time is spent doing detailed tracking of something that is deliberately vague and intended to be further understood later.
- Estimates made for these large, uncertain ideas are necessarily unreliable but detailed plans get made on the basis of them by other functions, like marketing.
Alternate Solution
The team spends time to understand their users’, customers’, and stakeholders’ problems and motivations. They identify opportunities for their product to solve those problems and prioritise the opportunities based on the value they provide. Their roadmap reflects the prioritisation of those opportunities and the investment that they want to make to address that opportunity.