Writing Cards

Tell Me a Story

Beautiful Words

What’s the Point, Man?

• Devs know what to build
• Business people know what’s being built
• Management can use estimates and actuals to estimate cost of future work
• Cards are a translation layer

Components of a Card

• Story
• AC
• TN

Story

• Simple sentence or couple of sentences
  • Often in the form of “Given that X, I want to Y, so that Z”
• What are we doing?
  • In non-technical terms. Plain English that anyone can understand
• Why are we doing it?
  • Why is it worth the high cost of a developer’s time?
• For Who?
  • Who is benefiting from this change?

Always be Selling

• I’m writing flyway to add database tables
• I’m adding the ability to save payments so Sales can add new clients
• I’m saving the company $10,000 a month by eliminating manual labor for Sales to acquire new customers

Acceptance Criteria

• Definition of Done
• Could be written by the PO/PPM
  • Not technical
  • Not implementation specific
  • Clearly / easily provable
• Does not tie a dev to a specific implementation or solution
• Will determine the size of the card
  • Can be split into other cards when there is more than a single vertical slice

Vertical Slice

• Feature or piece of feature that can be shown on its own
  • Should be as small as possible while still being possible to demo in some way
• Provides Value
  • Could be very small value or partial value, as long as it can be demoed on its own
• Is not limited to a specific part of the tech stack, but generally goes from front end through database (vertical, not horizontal)

Technical Notes

• Notes that devs or tech lead thought were important
  • Written for the devs; can be technical
• May include references to examples or documentation
• May include implementation hints or ideas, but are not stated as requirements
• May inform other areas of the card, but are not requirements in themselves
• Initial thoughts by the card writer, then given more detail by the team when the card is sized

Spikes

• A card that asks a list of questions
• Should still have a story that explains why it’s valuable to spend time answering these questions
• Instead of AC, will have a list of questions to be answered
• Completion is marked by the answering of each question
• Not pointed in some companies, as you’re not delivering business value. In other places a spike is pointed because it still takes up developer time. This just depends on how the team uses/tracks points.

Tech Debt / Tech Cards

• Cards that are technical in nature to the point of not having direct user impact
• Cards meant to clean up debt created by taking shortcuts or operating under bad assumptions
• These can be harder to demo
• Should still have a story, AC, and TN (always be selling)

A Bad Card

• Story
  • Create DB column for phone numbers
• AC
  • Phone number column exists and has proper permissions
• TN
  • Make sure to use semicolons

A Good Card

• Story
  • As a member of the sales team, I want to track customer phone numbers, so that I can follow up with new customers
• AC
  • Phone numbers can be stored by the sales team
  • Phone numbers can be viewed by the sales team
• TN
  • We’ll want to add an index since future reports will run off phone number
  • We should be able to use our existing auth for this