Bamboo Blog

It seemed wasteful to bring the entire development team of four into the whole-day User Stories Workshop, so we didn't. I wanted to take half an hour to brain-dump the result into the two absent developers, but never got the chance. So we went into the estimation session with two developers who'd been at the USW, and two who were working only from the cards.

We tried Speed Poker without success; two developers were playing '?' cards or wildly varying estimates. The estimating took a half-day, using up all the time we'd saved at the workshop.

The User Stories Workshop isn't just about writing story cards; it's about loading a whole lot of extra data, that doesn't make it on to the cards, into the brains of everyone there. I still think we can optimise the process, since the developer-developer interface is higher bandwidth than the client-developer interface (and much higher than the meeting-developer interface). But in cases where we do exclude some people from the workshop, we need to rigorously schedule a developer brain-dump immediately afterwards.