I'm curious about how those of you using SAFe Agile (or any Agile variant, I guess) handle story creation. How much time do you put into writing stories before PI planning, or just in general?
For us, it seems like we spend way too much time in discovery, trying to nail down every little detail and cover every possible scenario. It's kind of ridiculous. In my experience, no matter how much you plan upfront, there are always things you don't know or can't predict once you start coding. Those surprises mess with the stories we wrote, forcing rewrites or sometimes scrapping them completely. I'm not saying we should just dive in and code with no plan, but there’s got to be a middle ground... some balance between writing good stories and letting developers do the research they need during development.
To explain a bit more, we often run into issues where we start feature work after PI planning, only to find out (like much later) that there’s an architectural limitation in our software. This can stop a feature component from being built as planned or make it less flexible than the product owner wanted. When this happens, we end up burning extra time figuring out how to make it work, checking how it affects other systems, and scrambling to deliver. My take is we should push back and say, "Look, this isn’t fully doable this iteration. We can put in a basic version that’s good enough for now, but anything more needs to be a feature request for next time." Right now, we’re bending over backwards to deliver everything asked of us, no matter how tough (and, I think, this is partly because of the super-star dev on our team sees it as a challenge).
The problem is, we usually don’t even spot these issues until we’re deep in the code. Most of the time, no amount of upfront research catches this stuff...it only shows up when you’re actually building. So, I’m wondering: how do you all find that balance? How much effort do you put into upfront story writing versus leaving room for discovery during development?
