Vertical Slicing Game?

[George Paci]

I've been beating the drum for slicing user stories vertically (as
opposed to horizontally, by architectural layer), and I've helped some
teams start doing so, but a couple teams Just Aren't Getting It. I sat
in a meeting today where one team didn't get a bunch of stories to Done
in the just-ended sprint, partly because they were too darn big, and
partly because they were sliced up horizontally.*

One of the (unstarted) stories consisted of three tasks: write unit
tests for the top layer, write unit tests for the middle layer, write
unit tests for the bottom layer. You can see the ridges and whorls of
my handprint on my forehead, I face-palmed so hard.**

This looked like a teachable moment, so I pointed out that much of their
difficulty came from slicing the stories horizontally instead of
vertically. One response was that "Slicing stories vertically is
hard." I wish I had answered: "Yes, slicing stories vertically is hard
at the beginning of the sprint. But slicing them horizontally makes
things hard at the end of the sprint. When do you have more time and
energy?"

Anyway, I think half this team gets it now, but I need some way of
conveying the benefits of vertical over horizontal to the rest of the
team (and plenty of other teams).

Does anyone know of a game (in the vein of the Penny Game) that helps
explain vertical slicing? Failing that, can anyone make one up on the
spur of the moment and post it here?

--George


(* Also partly because they had a lot of Work In Process, possibly
because of the desire to keep people busy, and partly because some
stories turned out to involve twice the work they expected.)

(** In my internal narrative, anyway.)

[Morgan Ahlström]

Hi George,

first, let me say that I usually prefer to work with the team's own stories and help them with something they're already familiar with. They are right in that it is hard to do if you're not used to doing it and I find that academic discussions have very limited value. That said, if I just have a couple of minutes to explain the concept I often take a login function as an example. If you want to add some security to your site but don't have the time to implement a fully fledged login function, would you rather have a nice database with all the tables you'll ever need but no calls to it or would you rather have a simple function where you can type a username and a password that are checked against at simple table? Next iteration you can add the possibility to change your password. The third iteration you'll add functionality to handle a lock out after three failed attempts. The fourth iteration you'll add ...

Ask them for the simplest thing that could possibly work and add on from that.

I guess you could also use the row-columns-exercise if you create a story around the work that describes the rows as different architectural layers and the columns as slices of functionality. My friend Marcus Hammarberg wrote a blogpost on that exercise when we ran it a couple of years back. http://www.marcusoft.net/2011/09/kanban-inizing-avega-group.html

Cheers!

/Morgan

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[Paul Tevis]

I've run teams through Alistair Cockburn's Elephant Carpaccio exercise, with some success: http://alistair.cockburn.us/Elephant+Carpaccio+Exercise

--Paul

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[George Dinwiddie]

Supreme George,

I don't have a game, but I do have an exercise.

Sit the team down and talk with them about all the acceptance scenarios
needed to ensure the functionality works as intended. Each of those
scenarios represents a thin slice.

Another way to look at slicing is the hamburger method:
http://gojko.net/2012/01/23/splitting-user-stories-the-hamburger-method/

- George

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* George Dinwiddie * http://blog.gdinwiddie.com
Software Development http://www.idiacomputing.com
Consultant and Coach http://www.agilemaryland.org
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