As a deck builder, I would like to…

As a deck builder, I would like to…

I designed a deck! As surprising as this account may read, yes, I did! And I used agile to help me out ??

For a few months now, I’ve been researching how to build a deck. I went to a few companies and they were charging loads of money to design a fairly complicated deck in our back garden. So, to save some money, I embarked on this journey of designing, purchasing material, and constructing a deck myself!

My vision for the project was to offer a place where adults and kids could enjoy themselves in our back garden. We had a step between our garden door and grass which made it very dangerous for little ones to be running around. Also, we wanted to have a bit of space outside the grass for the (often) rainy days in London.

As I am new to the business of carpentry, I decided to break down the design into specific themes (hint hint – epics):

• Purchasing decking material
• Treating the area where the deck will be built
• Levelling the area where the deck will be built
• Designing the foundation
• Designing the structure
• Adding the decking boards to the structure
• Final touch – painting etc.

Each one of these themes represented a value-adding activity to the project. For example, when researching the material, I was trying to balance quality, reliability, and price.

I like the following template for writing epics.

For <Customer or Persona> who <performs a task> the <solution/module name> is a ?<“How?” / Typical workflow/solution description> that?<what value we are creating/Make monetary where possible> unlike?<competitor, current solution or non-existing solution> our solution <does something better — the ‘why’>

So, if we were to apply this template to “Designing the structure”, it should look like the following:

For visitors who are partying in Victor’s garden, the?deck structure is a levelled, stable, safe, and reliable structure that can sustain a party of up to 20 people, between kids and adults unlike?the existing garden which has a step, and it is dangerous for little ones our solution will optimise the space and provide a levelled area for kids to play and adults to enjoy themselves.

After working on the themes, we need to start breaking them down the work at the feature level. For the “Designing the Structure”, we could list:

• Organizing joists: “As a deck builder, I must organise the joists most efficiently so I can save material but maintain reliability”.
• Laying joists on top of deck risers: “As a deck builder, I must lay the joists so the space between each joist is at a maximum of 40 cm”.
• Fastening joists: “As a deck builder, I must use a fastening method that will yield stability and reliability, but it is also easy to implement”.

There are many other attributes to fully describe these features – Acceptance Criteria, Definition of Done, Dependencies etc. Also, if I had a team, I probably need to go through all the agile ceremonies to plan the work (PI planning, Sprint Planning, etc).

Now that we have our initial themes, we need to start executing some of the work. I believe that’s where this small effort into planning the deck helped. I faced several challenges when levelling and laying out the structure and I had to pivot quickly because I only had a couple of days to work on the deck. Having high-level tasks helped to describe the end of the goal.

For example, the garden level is slightly higher than the door level so I couldn’t have a single level deck. This new requirement would change the fact that I need a “levelled, stable, safe, and reliable structure”. However, it did mean that I had to consider the new requirement of raising part of the deck (or maybe lowering another part). So, it is an additional story to the existing stories that I had defined.

Writing epics, features and user stories is an art. It requires a lot of practice to ensure that you capture the essence of what you are trying to do. When properly designed, epics, features and user stories can be extremely helpful in guiding teams through the scope. If it has all the attributes, these stories can be managed by teams, shifting the decision-making process to them, and empowering team members to make decisions!

Here is the result of the deck: