One of the fun things about working at Carbon Five is that we get a chance to work on product ideas we design and build ourselves. This gives us an opportunity to experiment with technologies and processes that interest us. Recently, I’ve been contributing to Carbometer:Blog, an information radiator that visualizes details about blog traffic.
This project is led by a Balanced Team which includes a developer (Rob), a designer (Lane) and a product owner (Christian). We thought this would be a great opportunity extend our agile process to look at user experience (UX) and development activities in a unified way and put all our stories in Pivotal Tracker as a unified backlog.
From my perspective as the user experience (ux) designer on the project, I think it’s important we have a unified design/dev backlog so that:
Here’s some specifics about how we include both UX and development stories in Pivotal Tracker.
So far we’re really happy with the way this is working out, however I feel there is still room for improvement. Here are a few things we plan to reflect on and try later.
By not assigning a size to UX stories, we don’t get better at predicting how long UX activities take and we don’t have visibility into the project’s true velocity, which needs to account for both design and development stories. The blocker seems to be that we don’t have an equivalent scale for design stories and development stories. As I mentioned earlier, we’re using Fibonacci numbers for estimation. The reference scale we agreed upon for development stories was: a one pointer was building out a simple page with minor testing, a three pointer was building out a page with the modification of the full MVC stack, a five pointer involves the implementation of a full MVC stack, an eight pointer was an epic story that has to be decomposed. If we assigned design stories points without an equivalent scale, the tracker velocity would become unreliable/inconsistent. I believe that it is possible to create an equivalent Fibonacci scale for design stories. Rob and I plan to reflect on this and try it out together during our next iteration planning meeting.
I’d also like to see everyone on the team size all the stories together. At this point, we’re separate–only developers participate in sizing development stories and design stories are not sized. Even if designers and developers don’t entirely understand all the steps involved in each others’ work, I think over time the working group can learn to recognize different sized stories even if they involve activities they aren’t familiar with.
Here are some other other practices we’re experimenting with on Carbometer:Blog. Please let us know in the comments field if you’d like to hear more on any of these topics.
Lane Halley is a product designer at Carbon Five.