Chapter 12. Feature cards: a tool for “just enough” planning
When we plan an agile project, we try to do so in a lean fashion. We want to gather the minimal information needed to prioritize, sequence, and estimate a feature, so we can deliver high-value features as soon as possible. We can do this without creating detailed functional specifications and without guessing at all the tasks that we may need to complete, by creating feature cards.
Feature cards start the discussion between the customer and the project team and support reaching common agreement on what a feature entails. In this chapter we will show you how much information to place in a feature card and how to involve your team in the creation of the cards; we will also discuss the limitations in using cards.
To help you better understand feature cards and the feature-card exercise, let’s look at the structure of a card.
Feature cards are similar to the user stories used in Extreme Programming (XP) development. We also often use the term feature shell to describe a feature card. The card provides enough information to plan a feature and discuss it quickly. The size of the card also makes it easy to track a feature and re-plan when necessary.
Let’s look at a completed feature card (see figure 12.1).