The most effective approach I’ve ever used for user story refinement is to agree on who the likely developer will be for each story in a whole team session.
Assign each story to their likely developer, leaving them to read through the stories outside of the session.
The developer decides if a story is sufficiently clear. If so, they refine it with another tester in their own time, marking it as ‘fully refined’ when both agree.
Everyone has an optional meeting invite in their calendar for an hour each morning, where they can ‘drop in’ to discuss their stories and seek clarification from me.
All I asked was that they arrange for a tester to attend the call and give me 5 minutes’ notice to stop what else I was doing.
I call this “Distributed Refinement”, and it’s worked so well that I can’t imagine returning to whole team refinement sessions.
If you are unhappy with your development team, they may need more detailed guidance.
Better software requirements can help with this.
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Frank Ray Consulting. Software requirements for agile development teams, particularly remote, outsourced and offshore development teams working in financial services. |