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Reinventing Agile: From Value to Solutions

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 Author, comentator and InfoQ editor Jean-Jacques Dubray has written a blog titled Reinventing Agile: From Value to Solutions in which he challenges the structure of Agile user stories.  He states that:

An argument can be made that the user story is the most important artifact in agile development, because it is the container that primarily carries the value stream to the user, and agile development is all about rapid value delivery.

However, he goes on to say that

In practice, very few people focus on the benefits part of a user story. All user stories I see are either what we used to call "requirements" (just phrased slightly differently but isomorphically) or "tasks" needed to advance the state of the project.

And 

However, there is a fundamental flaw in the construction of user stories, even when they are properly written, because they somehow make an assumption about the shape of the solution, and drive the author to turn almost immediately in solution mode, leaving no room for creative and out-of-the-box thinking.

Using the BOLT notation he traces the relationship between business problems and user stories.  The most common approach to identifying user stories is as a hierarchy, which he disagrees with

Ultimately, the relationship between problems and solutions is a graph (states, transitions as problems, actions as solutions), and this is where the coupling between the problem space and the solution space at the User Story level becomes unfortunate. This means that User stories cannot be effectively nested and clearly cannot fit in hierarchical structures (which is common to most Agile tools I know). This problem is quite acute as teams struggle to connect business level user stories and system level or solution level user stories. The concept of having a single parent directly conflicts with the possibility of having multiple possible transitions into a single state and decomposition principles where the same problem appears in the decomposition of several higher level problems.

He proposes a change to the way "requirements" are expressed in Agile:

To take advantage of this new conceptual framework. I suggest that we make a very simple and easy change to Agile and replace "user stories" by "problem statements". Each problem must be "solutioned", either by decomposing it into simpler problems or solutioning it directly. Value can still be used to prioritize which problems are addressed first, that part of the Agile and Lean movement is very valuable, so too speak, but the focus on problems and solutions opens a new flexibility in how we handle the long range aspects of the solution while enabling the highest level of creativity and ultimately a direct articulation with the IQ of the organization

He goes on to present suggestions for expressing problem statements (while carefully avoiding offering a canned approach).  He states that there is a rich vocabulary for expressing problem statements because

This new focus on problem & solution provides a rich conceptual framework to effectively organize the work of a team. After all, we have been innovating, i.e. creating solutions to problems, for thousands of years.

 

 

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