Working with stories

This is the second post in our "How we work" series, in which we detail, well... how we work. For more information, check out the previous post.

Once we have wireframes and stories we add all stories to the great tool Pivotal Tracker. We estimate the complexity of every story by giving it between 0 and 3 points, which is used later to measure progress. When both our client and we are confident we have covered everything, we start developing.

Once we start working on a story the developers "start" the story and "finish" it when they're done. The project manager on our side regularly tests the finished stories. If he thinks they're implemented well he "delivers" them to the staging environment. After that the client tests what's covered in the story and "accepts" the story if she thinks the implementation is correct and would be happy to put what's been built into production.

If the client has any issues, she will "reject" the story with a short comment. If a story is rejected we will "restart" it, find out what's wrong with what we delivered, fix that and deliver the story again. This process repeats itself until the client accepts the story.

Since every story has a a number of points tracker can track how many points were accepted in a week. This number is called "velocity" and is used to estimate how much time it will take to finish all stories in a release. The nice thing about this number is that it indicates what the client accepted, so it's is a very realistic measure of progress compared to numbers from other planning methods.

This gives us and the client a pretty good idea about how much time it will take to get to a certain point. It also helps to set priorities, for example to find out if moving a few features out of scope will allow the project to meet a certain deadline. Our clients can always exactly see what we're working on and get an up-to-date estimate of the time it will take to finish what still has to be done.

The next post in this series will be about "Acceptance testing and continuous integration."