I’ve been using and preaching Vertical Slicing of stories for a long time now and I still come across teams that don’t do it or don’t really see the value in it. I recently had a conversation with a PO from a team who gave me his perspective on the practice.
To set the context, I had been asked by a client to get status on a few different teams quarterly deliverables. I went forward and requested a few meetings with the team’s PO’s. Attending the meetings, I noticed that most PO’s asked the tech lead/managers to attend the meetings. I then had a meeting with the last team’s PO and it was just him. He promptly gave me the updates I needed himself. I asked him why he didn’t have to ask the tech leads/managers to find out where things are at. And I was very pleased to hear that he said vertical slicing of stories. He then gave me some details, which I’ll share:
“PMs should want to [use Vertical Slicing]:
- It makes it so much easier to create stories. What piece(s) of functionality are needed to get completed in this sprint? For QA purposes add some design details, but if you have the Functionality + the designs, the rest is obvious. What does every button allow someone to do?
- It makes it so much easier to track. Literally can say “this piece of functionality will be released at this time, and it will do X Y and Z”, and I can track that from a single ticket. Not only that, but everyone else can track it from a single ticket.
- Grooming becomes so much easier. Is this something we think 1 or 2 devs can do in a single sprint? If yes, great, let’s groom it. Versus “this is the front end, we have to wait til the back end is done, then create the integration point, then test…..” Nope, can two of you work together to finish this single page with this functionality in a single sprint? Great, let’s groom.
QA and Dev are the tricky ones, for Dev it’s a new experience, but the way I sold it is “it’s literally no different than doing an epic with backend and front end stories. It’s the exact same. Just instead of doing a really large thing, let’s do a lot of little things. For QA the concern was testing, how do they test backend frontend etc…same as above, it’s literally no different than epics with a lot of frontend/backend stories, but the slices are smaller and more easily digestible. Would you rather develop and QA 5 tickets, 3 backend and 2 frontend, that lead to a feature, or 3 full stack tickets? “
I wanted to share it straight from the words of my PO. It’s a great perspective. I hope this encourages teams to embrace Vertical Slicing of stories for these benefits and the benefit of getting Customer Value out the door sooner!
Work-Agile 