Story Cards

Story cards are a high level requirement for the project. They should hold just enough information to spark conversations between the product owner, developers and the QA's.

In the team I currently work in, we have 5 different colours of story cards:

• WHITE - these are business value cards and each one should give the project some new functionality from a users point of view. They can also include re-factoring that the Product Owner has specified that the customer wants.
• YELLOW - these are non-functional cards and relate to things like the performance, availability etc.
• PINK - these a defect cards and are only raised if the white card that they erlate to is already "DONE". If the white card is still in play then it is not a defect, just functionality that hasn't been created yet.
• BLUE - these are technical debt or "Spikes" which are used to do further investigation on a topic before it is raised in a card.
• GREEN - these are cards for front-end designs.

There is certain information that needs to be on every card:

• It must have the card owner, which is the person that is currently in charge of this card coming into throughition
• The user story which is a quick sentence which describes what the card is about
• The acceptance criteria which are the things that need to be completed on this card for it to be "DONE". If possible, they should be written from a users perspective and they do not need to be overly prescriptive as this should make the QA and the Developers talk about the card
  
• The teams estimate on how long this card should take to develop
• The amount of work that has been done on the card each day and the amount of time they think they will need to complete it
• They should have some way of tracking they different people that have seen this card, e.g. developers, QA, Product Owners

The way that our team tracks the path of a card is by putting different coloured stickers for each type of team member:

• RED - Development
• BLUE - QA
• ORANGE - Product Owner
• YELLOW - Designer
• GREEN - "DONE"

Each week we collect all the business value (white) cards, which are "DONE", and present them to our customers in a showcase. This keeps them in touch with what we have completed and the progress we are making on the project. It also gives them the chance to see the product working and may decide that some of the functionality needs to be re-factored.