How do we choose what to build first?
One approach to help figure this out, is to play a simple four-quadrant game: look at each story’s value and cost.
- Valuable and cheap: do it now.
- Valuable but expensive: do it later.
- Not valuable and cheap: maybe someday.
- Not valuable and expensive: don’t do it.
This is just a guide to get the ball rolling, in some cases the results don’t always make sense. For example, Logout might be important and cheap, so do it; But Login may be important but costly, so wait;
But Logout only makes sense if Login exists first.
Another example might be if Withdrawal is considered costly to build, but it might be decided that it’s worth building early.
Stakeholders pick the highest bang-for-buck until the chosen stories add up to the team’s guessed velocity (say 30 points). And that becomes the plan for the iteration.
Discussions for your team
- How do we decide what’s “valuable”?
- How do we decide when a story is “too expensive”?
- Who needs to “okay” the final list of stories for the iteration?
- When will we work on the postponed high-cost, high-value items?
- How can we validate the ROI at the end of the iteration?