Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”

One User Story at a Time

Next—and this intersects both with Chapters 1 and 4—limit the team to working on one release at a time. Even within a release, try to focus the team on one user story at a time. If you have small tasks, you can increase “parallelization” of the work being done. The developers on the team can all work on development tasks that implement a given user story, and testers can immediately start testing code as coding tasks are completed. The same holds true for writers—as coding tasks are completed, things such as necessary error messages, help screens, and associated product documentation can also be done. While the developer writes the code, the tester writes the associated test cases and sets up the test environment so that ...