Practice: Favor finishing a story over starting a new one

Posted on 11. Jul, 2010 by Guilherme Silveira in agile, practice

Symptom: Right before your development cycle finishes, which can be an iteration, a sprint or anything similar, all stories are marked as finished, giving a feeling of complete success. During the review meeting, when the Product Owner verifies what has been done, the number of approvals is extremely low: most of the stories are rejected.

Action: Even when using a short development cycle – for instance a 2 weeks iteration – waiting for the last moment to check for approval means postponing denials and making it impossible to fix the mistakes on time.

The best moment to get feedback from the client is as soon as the teams has released the functionality into a testing system enviroment (see continuous deploy and one-click-deployment).

For those who use a physical board, add a “Waiting for approval” column, so the done criterium depends on such approval, which will be received during the iteration/sprint.

Physical board with a to be approved column

When using a ticket system, create a state called “waiting for approval”, that visually tells your client its status:

Digital board with waiting for approval status

When to stop doing it: After creating this column or state, as time passes by, the process to ask for approval during the iteration might become natural in a way that there is no need for a visual reminder.

At this moment, it is possible to remove the column as it has already taken part of the teams every day life. If the problem appears again, start all over until your team is used to it.

Tags: agile, approval, iteration, kanban, lean, practice