So just in the last sprint we (re) discovered that we need an owner of each story. A person who makes sure things are going smoothly and takes care that everything is done in a way so we can fulfill all acceptance tests. At sprint start the person which feels the strongest about the first story will be owner and he will drive the story.
Very often we do operate in a king and servant model. The king (story owner) calls as many servants he needs to get ‘his’ story (with the highest priority) done. If this story does not scale to the full team the others are starting on the next story. Again, a story owner (king) is chosen (or whoever wants to drive the story). Of course story priority is always determining the order of allocating resources to finish the job.
To formalize the story owner a little bit we do write down the name of the person in the upper right corner of the story card. I updated the scrum board cheat sheet.
Get version 1.1 of the Scrum Board Cheat Sheet.
2 Responses to “Updated Scrum Board Cheat Sheet with Story Owner”
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You might find that once the team develops a degree of comfort in delivering finished work of high enough quality that you can indeed rotate ownership and collectively own the stories.
A major downside of any individual owning a story through its life is that if that person is otherwise called away for other duties, is sick or away, the void cannot easily be filled by the ream. Collective ownership is best experimented with once you have some momentum and maturity as a team to move onto more challenging collective ownership.
I would also couch the above by saying that it would be much harder to achieve collective code/story ownership without continuous pair-programming.
This story owner is there to more or less have an overview what kind of resources this story needs. Since at least 70% of the team is working on the top most story almost everybody knows what to do. If more resources are needed people from the next story will switch to this one and help out. It’s the duty of the story owner to bring them up to speed. Writing down one person is hopefully avoiding dialogs like: ‘I thought you did it”, “Na, I thought you talked to Joe”.
The story owner role can be fulfilled by anyone working on that story the whole time. If this person goes away from some reason someone else can take over with no problems.