Developing story is the process of building a narrative arc that takes a protagonist on a journey of change, growth, and transformation. The plot develops over the course of the story by introducing obstacles and challenges that increase in frequency and intensity as the conflict progresses. This tension is heightened by the introduction of subplots and by raising the stakes through a series of crises. A major setback or crisis brings the central conflict to a head and determines the fate of the protagonist. During the fallout from this climax, the story resolves subplots and provides closure for supporting characters.
Unlike traditional work breakdown structure methods, agile DW/BI teams do not attempt to re-engineer their project backlogs into a fixed scope for each release. Rather, they continuously refine their developer stories to match the scope of their team’s velocity. The steady decomposition of developer stories improves a team’s capacity to turn them into working code during iterations, which in turn improves the team’s velocity.
A good way to approach this decomposition is to consider a candidate developer story’s dependency on other developer stories in the project backlog. If the candidate story is dependent on other developer stories that require significant amounts of effort to implement, then those dependencies should be considered when evaluating its risk. For example, a developer story that requires the loading of data from multiple source systems can be decomposed into multiple stories that load the data into separate sets of warehousing tables (row sets). This reduces the amount of effort required to deliver this new data and makes the incremental delivery more demonstrable to the product owner.