In a highly iterative project (XP or Evidence Based Planning), tasks get very granular, on purpose. Bite-sized, even. XP says ‘everything should be a 1 point ticket’, but that’s a bit dogmatic. Evidence Based Planning says “everything should be as small as reasonably deliverable.”
It gets really detailed. You have to think through ALL the details. And write them down. You really push to eliminate all the uncertainty. One successful mental model for doing this is “Thin, Bin, Split.” Evidence Based Planning emphasizes the Split portion of this approach.
Bonus: Once you have the detailed tickets in hand, someone else can come by, say from another team and say, “yeah, this all makes sense. You didn’t miss anything.” But estimates, you don’t know what went into that estimate. That one’s 3 points. That one’s 7 points. Why? It feels like it?
When you break tickets down appropriately small, it helps teammates to regularly get into a state of psychological flow. No more having to make huge shifts between development, testing, and PR review. Instead, they all become part of the same daily rhythm. When you break tickets down this small, it also sets teammates up for a series of small wins, constantly feeling progress, rather than being stuck on an intractable 13 point ticket for two weeks.
The downside to this approach, is that instead of holistic User Stories that are end-to-end complete workflows with no explicit blockers to a single developer being able to deliver it, it becomes an interlocking series of pre-requisite task tickets. You can’t display a form submission error message, if the form’s API endpoint doesn’t exist yet! But that’s fine. In fact, that’s great. Preemptively uncovering all of the steps required to complete a feature is key to your success.
So, how do you manage to keep developers unblocked in such a granular world? Sure, Jira offers the “Blocks” issue link, and Azure DevOps offers the “Successor” work link type. But there’s not really a great way to see all those links in aggregate, to understand your critical path to completion. That’s why we made Issue Flow (Jira app, is available now, AzDo extension is coming soon).
With Issue Flow, you can visualize your blockers and chart your path.
All issues found by the JQL/WIQL queries will be displayed, along with any links that already exist between them. From the issue flow graph, you can drag cards around, draw links, and remove links. The results are saved immediately to your project.
This works not just at the story and task level; this can be used at the Roadmap level to mark epics and features as blockers for each other, even across projects. The not-so-surprising truth is that it’s not just stories and tasks that should be broken down further, but so should epics. Most epics are too big. Properly granular epics can make Gantt charts impossible for even the best product managers to follow.
Issue Flow’s flowcharts makes quick iterations not just possible, but delightful!
Get started now!
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1235937/issue-flow-by-den-red-wolf
