4 Describing and prioritizing features
This chapter covers
- BDD and Product Backlog Refinement
- Describing and organizing features
- Breaking features into user stories
- Using Real Options to determine the best time to commit to building a particular feature
- Using Deliberate Discovery to reduce the impact of what you don’t know
- Planning releases
In the previous chapter you learned how important it is to understand why you’re building a piece of software and what its ultimate purpose will be in business terms. We looked at how you can clarify what you want to achieve and how you expect this to benefit the business (the business goals), and also at who will benefit or be affected by the project (the stakeholders) and what you need to deliver at a high level to achieve the business goals (the capabilities). And we learned about Impact Mapping and Pirate Canvases two powerful techniques that can help to understand business needs and identify features that might deliver these needs.
Now it’s time to describe how you can provide these capabilities. In this chapter we look at the next step, which is to discuss and describe the deliverables you discovered through Impact Mapping or on a Pirate Canvas. We will learn how to break down high level features or epics into user stories, how to describe these features, and how to prioritize them using Deliberate Discovery and Real Options, and how what we learn during this process can help us plan for upcoming sprints and releases.