How To Make The Best Story

[Maggie Szydlowski]

Everytime I walk into their sprint planning session, I do not like what I see. It's absolute silence and we can practically hear ourselves breathing. The SM is the only person talking and tries to create tasks, one-by-one, for each story.

I try to encourage the PO and developers to ask questions, but I have developers who are very "passive" (not pro-active). No developer will voluntarily request to be assigned a task (like I use to do and have seen done by so many of my peers). They sit and almost wait to be assigned tasks (which was how it was before I introduced Agile).

Our sprint planning sessions are WAY too long (almost a full day) for a two week sprint. There is a lot of wasted time discussing things that should probably have been ironed out before the session by the PO.

I just want all the boilerplate work to be done before developers and others join the session. Having everyone sit through several minutes per story watching the SM create and name tasks, set the JIRA fields, etc. is entirely counter-productive.

b) Ask the Scrum Master to stop talking ;), to stop entering stuff to JIRA during the planning meeting. He should facilitate the meeting and encourage developers to do this work and not do this instead of them.Give pens and postit stickers with story names to developers and let them write on a sticker the tasks for that story. And take the keyboard from Scrum Master. He does not need it during the meeting. Give it to someone else.

The tasks like: design, tests, review should be a part of general Definition of Done of the team. I do not think it is needed to put them to the story during planning. It depends on what is the goal of adding them there - to have them visualized so that the size of the story can be estimated well or just to have a checklist if all the steps were done.

If it is needed for estimation and the team prefers to have it written down, then it is fine. If the team do wants to have those tasks in JIRA to have kind of checklist (do they want? or you want it? :)) then a developer when starting to work on a story can add those generic tasks. During planning it would be enough to mention it - that's something that SM can do: "guys remember that you need unit tests as well".

In my team tasks added to a story during planning session are more like: add a new button to screen A, create a new screen B, create a new db table, improve the SQL query. We put "unit tests" tasks usually when we know that in a specific story we expect a lot of effort in making/maintaining unit tests. Usually we do not write down "unit tests" task to a story as we all know it needs to be done.

This is the common problem which was faced by everyone who are new to Agile. Because Agile is more about taking ownership and resposiblity which was lacking in other methods. To answer your question..

Before you goto Sprint Planning Meeting, Business Analyst and Product Owner should have discussion and priortize the list of features which you have according to your business needs. Before prioritizing the Business Analyst should break down the features into small task and with PO these should be prioritized. In this way when you go for Sprint Planning Meeting you can avoid time in discussion which features to be address.

To bring in more involvement from your developers, you should first teach them how Agile works. Make them understand you are suppose to take ownership. It can be done in a simple way, in your initial meetings please avoid people from Management team, make your dev team feel confortable, make sure that what ever they speak its not going to communicated to Management team. May be initial days you can give them some time say them these are features according to priority go back do effort estimation and let the team know how much time you need, who works on which feature etc. This way you can make them involved.

Like other responses have indicated, it's really about ownership. In my experience, developers really like to solve problems - it's what brings them satisfaction in their work. Usually when I see a low level of interaction, it's because the developers feel like they're being giving a list of things to do and they're just acquiescing. That may or may not be what's happening, but I've never seen a case of low involvement where that wasn't the perception.

This is the same problem that waterfall has. Tier 1, business leadership, decides on some requirements and passes them down with Tier 2, the PMO, then they make tasks and give them to Tier 3, the developers, which make them, then we go back up the chain and hope whisper down the alley didn't happen.

The key is that all levels are engaged at the same time. The project should start with the team getting a high-level view of what they're trying to accomplish in the project, then as you approach each section, before you get into sprint planning, you vet ideas and requirements with team members (doesn't have to be all of them if you've got a big team. Your goal is to get involvement and buy-in, not kill productivity). For example, if you intend to tackle user feedback next sprint, a few days before it, have the product owner take the team to lunch and say "I need users to be able to give feedback with a single click from any page" - or whatever the high-level need is - "Like this site does - what do you guys think? How could we make X happen?" Take that conversation and iron out some basic stories to work from during sprint planning. Now you've got the idea in their heads for a few days, they've got some ideas rolling, and they come into sprint planning knowing what they'll be talking about and ready to share some solutions.

Disclaimer: I know this kinda breaks scrum because you're allowing POs and stakeholders to take the team off task. In my experience, the benefits of getting the team to buy in and own the solution far outweight the fact that you're taking them off task for a bit. That being said, it's something to be aware of and to control - if it starts getting out of hand, reel it back in.

This also can work really well if it's not common in other meetings Project kickoffs and release planning, for example, are great places to start these conversations too. Spending extra time to do discovery and brainstorming activities in broader planning sessions like release planning can really pay off throughout the project.

One last thing: don't worry too much about how long it's taking. You're right to worry that there's no involvement, but if the meetings are productive and it takes all day, then maybe that's how long it actually needs to go. When you pick arbitrary timeboxes for meetings like that, people will feel rushed and skip valuable discussions that will cause worse problems later.

We work basically on Agile methodology and I work for the team which is almost similar but bunch of QA not the developers.Before answering to the questions, some basics you need to know about the people whom you are working with. If you introduce anything then do not expect that you will get responses, specially when you are introducing something really new. Motivation is really important for them by a little giggling and being friendly somehow help them to open up themselves of what their interest is in which part of development as everyone cannot be expert in all the functionalities they develop. So digging in their minds at free time initially helps you to grasp their brains!

The term "best" is subjective, so naturally, not everyone's "best life" looks the same. For some people, living your best life is flying in a private jet while wearing the most expensive watch. And I mean...that's cool. You do you.

Personally, living my best life aligns more with things like incredible experiences, beautiful relationships, and ultimately being able to tell the most epic life story by the time I leave the face of this planet.

Similar to the story that prompted Co-Founder, Matt Wilson, to start Under30Experiences, an epic travel experience is exactly what inspired Zach Horvath to start Live A Great Story. After a 7 month stint of international travel, he came back to the states and realized the importance of travel and making the most of this life. He's since been committed to inspiring others to do the same.

I had the pleasure of connecting with Zach here in Austin a couple of months ago, and after realizing how much our company stories and values aligned, we decided that we had a unique opportunity to come together to help people live their best story!

-A package in the mail with one Under30Experiences sticker and one Live a Great Story sticker.

Take these stickers with you on your trips and tag both companies in your photos for a chance to be featured on both IG accounts!

-A chance to have your personal story published on both the Under30Experiences website & Live a Great Story website.

We will select ONE winner that will also receive a swag bag full of goodies, a $150 gift card to the Live a Great Story store, and $200 in U30X Experience Credits. (Details on how to submit stories will be emailed AND mailed to each person who purchases during the promo.)

The best ending is achieved by following specific requirements at certain points in the game. It's very difficult to explain without any spoilers, but it involves skipping certain events and items to get better items at a later point, and making sure you follow through on an optional sequence of events.

Well, five minutes ago I got stuck for long enough in Cave Story+ to finally fire up a walkthrough for the game. I was in Labyrinth B, looking for a power source of sorts, and I thought I'd done everything there needs to be done in the general neightbourhood, zealously saving after each event. Then I read:

I will say up front that I don't think that Easy difficulty affects this, but I've only played the original. However, unless they felt like being callous, it shouldn't have an impact (considering you can access the Best Ending in other alternate game modes as well).

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