Split Learning From Earning

From book "Fifty Quick ideas to Improve your user stories BOOK"

Working in software development most of times involves dealing with unknowns, uncertainties and ambiguity then implementation of some features may need research and investigation work, team will find it is hard to estimate or plan such type of user stories without identifying what is need to be done .

A good way to deal with such a vague implementation stories is to split research and investigation tasks into separate user stories with a goal/outcome of its owns,?So a story should be about earning or learning

• Learning stories?: help to plan and estimate required work better, have explicit goal to provide enough information so stakeholders can take a decision
• Earning Stories?: help to deliver value to end-users

When splitting earning from learning stories this opens a door for possibility that learning ends without a clear conclusion or even a decision that implementation is impractical , no surprises will arise in this case because team is committed to learning only not to deliver vague/ unclear story .

Team needs to commit on the output of a learning story , will it be quick prototype, a Proof of concept , or any type of information to be provided to stakeholders .

"In some cases I found that type of product backlog items called SPIKE need to be added to product backlog specially when team can't estimate a user story because work need to be done can't be identified so another type of investigation work will be included into a spike and the outcome of this spike should help to estimate and define work need to be done "

To know more about spikes