One of the recurrent puzzles with regard to requirements management that I keep running into is the question what would be the “right” size of a requirement. It often starts with some people coming up with very tiny and very specific requirements and then some very huge, completely fuzzy ones to go along with them. Then they have heared or read somewhere that in agile setups requirements should be small and wonder what this means and how to get there.

Cartoon by Geek&Poke on Epics
Advanced Scrum
Cartoon by Oliver Widder, licensed under CC BY 3.0 from [Geek&Poke]( http://geek-and-poke.com/geekandpoke/2016/11/6/advanced-scrum)

These huge requirements are often called “epics”: An epic is a requirement that is either felt to be too “large” or is too “fuzzy” and one way to avoid never-ending dramas is to split these into tinier user stories. Actually, here we already have two very distinct aspects: a requirement engineering question of how to move from unclear feature ideas to concrete detailed requirements on the one hand and a requirement management question on how to organize requirements such that they are appropriately prepared for implementation. I discussed the requirement engineering part in an article on agile conception already, so I’ll focus on the latter part here. This size question is actually two-fold: What is a reasonable small story? And how can we break down a big feature into several smaller stories? I’ll address the first one below, the next one in an upcoming article on splitting requirements.

Why small stories?

Let’s first explore the reasons to go for smaller stories. As mentioned above, there is often a felt need to come up with “small” user stories, whatever “small” might mean. This is often even part of making a requirement “ready” for the team to start working on it (cf. also how a felt need for “small” stories is a hint for immature teams).

The main reason behind moving from “big” feature requirements to “small” user stories typically boils down to the team wanting to ensure that the work they take on can be finished within one iteration. From the agile point of view, that’s a good idea: We want to deliver value in terms of working software as quickly as possible. But even if your delivery is not exactly continuously and also doesn’t always happen at the end of the iteration, there is a lot of value in using small stories: developers, UX, product owner, stakeholders should give and take feedback on the completed work to ensure the development is on the right track (in terms of “Did we make it right?” and validation “Did we make the right thing?”). The earlier we learn about problems, the better, so we can make easy adjustments. Arguably small stories can be implemented more quickly and thereby help getting the necessary feedbacks quickly. Also, in case adjustments need to be made, changing a small story is hopefully easy (instead of changing a big requirement). Small user stories also help planning: for one thing, it is usually far easier to come up with an accurate and precise estimate if you’ve broken down a big problem (“epic”) into tiny pieces.

What is a reasonable small story?

This one has an easy answer: any requirement that the team feels can be surely finished within one sprint is reasonably small.

Does size equal effort?

Unfortunately, this answer isn’t particularly useful. It is simply taking the outlined main reason for small stories as a minimal acceptance criteria. If we take a step back, the size of requirement seems here to be directly bound to the effort it takes to implement it. It looks like a continuum: from “no implementation effort” to “takes the entire team the entire sprint to implement”.

But a story that takes the team the entire sprint to implement is almost certainly still too big. Think about it from a risk perspective: let’s assume your estimate is just a bit wrong (as in “too low”), e.g. you discover some previously unknown technical problem during the implementation. In this case you will not be able to finish the story within the sprint — from a work management perspective, you clearly want to avoid this situation, as you’ll run into all sorts of unwanted discussions (from relevant ones like when you get feedback to irrelevant management ones like what can be done to help the team deliver on time or to come up with better estimates).

Burn up charts
Effect of story size on burn up chart

Some teams take a very harsh stance at this and demand a “ready” story should not take longer than one day (of implementation and testing). I don’t believe in such strict rules but think a good upper bound is “no longer than one week”. With story point estimation this recommendation might look strange, but the simple idea is that if you know your team delivers ca. 20 points per two-weeks iteration, a 13 point story is probably too big, whereas an 8 point story could be small enough.

Of course, you can use the same reasoning of risk and project management to demand even smaller stories: e.g., with a 20 point velocity of a team, and three stories with 8 story points each, how would you plan your next sprint? Commit to two stories (summing up to 16 points) and leave one as a stretch goal? If you start working on the stretch goal but are not able to finish it, your efforts and results will not be visible (for the stretch goal). Instead, if you could break down the stretch goal into a 3 and a 5 point story, you might be able to commit to more points. Also, your burn-up chart might look a lot smoother with smaller stories than with big stories, cf. figure 2. But beware: what we really want is quick feedback and delivery of valuable increments. If smaller stories help you with this, great, if not, you’re likely just gaming numbers or making management happy (cf. also Johanna Rothman on the value of burndown and burnup) .

Consider functionality, too

However, the size of a requirement could also be addressed differently. Boris Gloger (e.g. in his German book on agile estimation) argues that estimates should not be based on effort or risk but on functionality. From this perspective, the smallest reasonable story is one whose implementation will enable one functionality.

This looks somewhat circular, as we have now moved from one fuzzy term (size) to another (functionality), in particular as in todays complex systems “one” functionality could be composed of a lot of different pieces playing together nicely. But requirement work is all about defining functionality in terms of specific, detailed user activities or system behaviors and as such is arguably easier to grasp and figure out than some number of story points.

It is usually the best idea to look at the functionality from the user’s point of view, because this will most closely resemble the business requirement anyway. But note that, without going further into architecture considerations, you might want to define functionality per system / component if you can define and observe the expected behavior per component. The “observe” part here is important as it is implemented, observable behavior that you can give feedback on. For the very same reason of getting feedback from humans, defining functionality from the user perspective is more preferable.

Now that we have discussed what the smallest story in terms of functionality could be, this might not be the most reasonable choice in your context. As a made-up example, consider the feature of where you want to save some document in some system. An additional feature could be to save a document under a different name (“save as”). From the implementation point of view, the difference in functionalities might be so small that it’s very easy to implement both in one go, so the team might decide that splitting off the “save as” is not worth it.

Another example could be where one user visible functionality (e.g. sending an order) requires the interaction of two systems (e.g. sending the order from some web application to some ERP system). Considering just one system part (e.g. the web application sending) as a user story might not be reasonable — it cannot be tested alone, hence doesn’t allow for feedback and also doesn’t provide any business value without the other system part. I believe this is where the entire team needs to give its input and consider not only the system functionalities but also (all) the tasks and the what is the minimum that makes a product increment valuable.

So now we have two different boundaries: whereas size in terms of functionality provides us with a lower boundary for a requirement (“implement at least one user-visible functionality”), size in terms of development effort provides an upper boundary (“can be implemented by the team in at most one week of an iteration”).

Clarity is required

Now, I believe there is a third “size” of a requirement which is related to clarity or level of understanding. Recall that at the start of many projects (or product phases) you’ll have a lot of very tiny and detailed requirements and some “bigger” requirements which have not been explored (or engineered) yet (which is what I would call “feature ideas”). An example of the former would be a user story along the lines of “As an editor, I need a save-as button right next to the save button so that I can give a new name under which to save my document”, whereas the latter would be something along the lines of “As a user, I want to save my preferences”. Quite obviously, the former is quite “small” and “clear”: it already says that a button is needed and what the expected behavior is. “User preferences” instead is just a label which might contain a huge list of things that need to be made customizable by the user and unless we break down this list into details, this requirement needs to be considered “big”. Another way of looking at this “big” story is that it is certainly not “ready” for implementation, so it is surely not a reasonable small-enough story. But even for the much clearer “save-as” story, there might be some lack of clarity on how to give the filename or other aspects (e.g. technical issues). Again, obviously we have a continuum between very clear and completely unclear.

Unfortunately, clarity alone will not be enough to decide whether a requirement is “small” enough: you can get very clear requirements that consist of lots of functionalities and are way too big to be implemented within one iteration (never mind huge use case or detailed specifications). However, from the perspective of “can we start implementing this requirement”, clarity of what needs to be implemented is the key ingredient that distinguishes a requirement from being “ready” from others. Clarity is a prerequisite to breaking it down into different functionalities and come up with a reasonable estimate (although it’s often also true that trying to break a big unclear requirement into smaller bits and pieces to come up with good estimates will help getting more clarity). Turning this around, even if you have a story that is reasonably small in terms of effort, if the team is raising concerns about the certainty of the estimates, the team is probably not sure whether it understands the functionalities that needs to be implemented and hence the story is probably still not “ready for implementation”.

Summing up, this leaves us with three important aspects influencing the “right” size of a story: clarity, functionality and effort. In the next article, I’ll explore some rules of thumb to split a big requirement into smaller parts.

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  • Not lost but found 
    More than the sum of its parts -- splitting requirements
    In the last article on the right size of a user story, I discussed some aspects that contribute to finding an answer that works in your context: clarity, functionality and effort. In this post, I want to discuss the question on how you can move from a big ...

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