story cards lifecycle

[Wass Lisovsky]

Which moment in a card lifecycle is best for converting story cards to
electronic form? I am interested in real experience and insights from
practioners, not just speculative notions 'the best moment is what
yourself find most convenient from your experience'.

Second, which form do you prefer: wiki / Excel spreadsheet / what
else? How do you organize them within that form - how does each card
look like? If it's easier to send a piece by email than to discribe --
welcome to do so.

Thanks,
Wass

[Wass Lisovsky]

"Ron Jeffries" <ronjeffries@REMOVEacm.org> wrote in message
news:55o4ivctqud47c20e4t2i7ltrfon5mm6s5@4ax.com... So I have to ask: what might converting story cards to electronic form
give you? There are some things one /might/ need, where electronic might help. Which
ones have you in mind?

For several reasons, most of them can be summarized to 'not fully XP yet':
a) developers can not always detail stories during iteration planning
meeting: spike is needed / different approaches to the problem should be
tried etc. Customer still wants to know engineer tasks for such stories.
b) as long as components are developed by their "owners" (which is legacy
we'll live with for some time), and the components are quite isolated (which
is normal on some projects), it is not time-efficient to keep the whole team
in a room for detailing engineering tasks for every story customer has.
c) most decisions in the company are made collectively, which is why 50% to
70% of discussions are in emails, not in oral conversations. We need a tool
to attach
d) it helps as a contract, as we're not immediately ready for acceptance
tests, and a customer still doesn't feel herself a member of the project
team.
e) we don't have enough space for having a whiteboard for every project we
have, and it's cheaper at this stage to convert the stories to electronic
form than to expand the office
f) well-known bunch of issues starting with 'cards can be lost; customer
can't see cards for stories he planned for the current iteration' etc.
On the other hand, we have on-site customer always available, for most
projects our iteration length is fixed and equals 7 days, and we split the
stories taking more than 1 ideal week of the team.

Wass