Daniel Bartl

A common practice of agile teams is estimating the cost or complexity of stories, quite often in collaborative planning poker sessions, while using story points as units. While this discussion and the shared understanding about the costs it hopefully leads to are essential, much more so than the actual story point number the team eventually comes up with, it would be such a pleasant surprise to see the whole product team discussing the actual value behind the stories planned similarly.

Having a shared understanding of the value of its work motivates the team. The discussion about the value itself is the positive side of the collaboration compared with the debate about the costs, which often, unfortunately, only leads to more stress and pressure on the development team. Finally, defining the value and costs of planned work items enables more meaningful prioritization. Using the language of the Agile Manifesto itself, one could express the above approach as “Value exploration over cost estimation.”

One of the benefits of the EventModeling approach is that spatially laying out the system as a sequence of state changes and dividing it into vertical, user-centric slices implicitly follows the above principle. A slice, as such, is already a vertical, user-centric, sufficiently specified unit of work and has a cost of one slice. The team can now focus on identifying and building the most valuable slices first.

For more details about EventModeling, visit https://eventmodeling.org.