Mars development documentary: Agile development One Thousand and One night 3 month: story tree

Document directory

• Story table?
• Story tree!

(Preface, one, two, three, four, five)

 

What does product backlog look like?

At first, I saw the word "backlog" as a back bag ("backpack"). I felt pretty good. There was a bag of things that was very heavy, and I thought everyone was drawing a pile of big bricks, just draw your own images. For example, the following one is the most used in the PPT.

But what exactly does this pile of bricks look like in the real world? Especially product backlog? I have visited many previous products, such as a huge list of stories. I have never seen anything except the list of stories.

The Sprint backlog is better. At least one story board, a story board, or a dashboard appears, but the product backlog is not so lucky.

Story table?

The first thought is very simple. A huge table without beginning or end is used as the product backlog. There are two fields in it: priority and status. The former represents which story is the most important and therefore needs to be developed. The latter represents the development. Click the mouse to sort by priority and select the most important one from the top until the workload is saturated.

However, this is not the case.

Since the first month we made a special user story generation page, creating a user story is no longer a matter of having to enter the database for manual operations. So intentionally or unintentionally, I thought of many valuable stories and entered them into the system without a head or mind.

After one person has been working for just two months, the story ID has risen to more than 50. Generally, the display of each story takes up to three rows. Therefore, only 10 stories can be displayed on one screen. Five screens are required to view all the stories.

If 10 people work for 12 months ...... 300 screens! Even if only the title is displayed, a screen of 100 is required. Who can see the "backlog of our product "? Will anyone use this agile development and management software after development?

"300 screen user stories ......" Walking on the streets of the autumn day, they feel as many fallen leaves as they do ......

Fallen leaves?

Story tree!

There are one thousand and one stories in "One Thousand and One Nights". The brutal king killed a newly-married queen in one day. As a result, the story of this queen was endless, and he heard the last story until the King turned his mind. When I was a child, I really saw almost all of the book "One Thousand and One Nights", and I know a lot of the details.

These 1001 stories are not about one more story. Otherwise, if a story is not wonderful, the King will give up all the work when he falls asleep. Instead, the story will be carried out in a loop. The starting point is the first story that the Prime Minister's daughter told to the King, followed by a story set. the deepest part is estimated to be four or five layers.

The king does not kill the Queen because "one of the stories is not finished", but just like our program debugging, it is running in a single step in the tree function call. The story inside is finished, the main () outside has not been withdrawn, so the king is reluctant to press SHIFT + F5, It is helpless to press 10 1001 times.

This is the story tree.

So why not try the story tree.

This month, we created a view that we did not find many products of our predecessors, but we had. So far, it is one of the most commonly used views, a story tree with falling branches and leaves.

Does it look like?

Note: the traditional "Tree" directory has only one column. For example, there are many fruit tree directories, and each directory has a lot of content to display, which will become very long, more like a "vine" than a tree, you need a large scroll bar to see the whole. The reason why the actual tree grows to be Fluffy is that there are always several first-level trunk trees that support the shape of the tree, and then the leaves grow on the top until the details are reached. The story tree in the figure is generated in this way. The level-1 directory is displayed horizontally and the entire tree shape is supported. The level-2 and above directories are still displayed vertically.

There is an old question: What is agile methods?

Now there seems to be an answer: If you may be beheaded the next day, you don't have time to worry about the red tape, and you don't want to sit down. The method you came up with that night is the agile method.

Appendix: actual story tree structure of the martian on

The above figure captures the Martian tree about half a year ago. The appearance of the Martian story tree is as follows. This is an image captured at 50% hours. During 100% hours, you need to scroll the screen once to see it completely.

This is only about a person's R & D workload for one year. In the process of larger teams and longer-term development, the concept of "story table" in the original sense is used alone, you cannot plan the entire product.

This problem has not been mentioned much before. It is mainly the inventor and practitioner of agile development. Most of them are technical developers rather than product managers, that is, most of them are team rather than Po, therefore, product backlog is seldom followed, but there are many practices for sprint backlog (storyboards, kanban, burn-out graphs, Moscow ......).