One Story, two phases: Discovery and Delivery
In many teams, the same requirement turns into two tickets: one for clarifying, one for building. That sounds tidy but separates what belongs together. Context gets lost, two tickets need maintenance, and nobody sees at a glance where the requirement stands. Betterplan takes a different approach: Discovery and Delivery belong in one Story.
The idea behind it
A Story is not a simple task but something that matures over a longer period. It goes through two phases and stays the same Story throughout:
- Discovery (What do we build?): Idea → Draft → Ready. Here you clarify value, rules and approach, through user conversations, technical checks or sketches.
- Delivery (How do we build it?): Todo → Doing → Done. Here the Story is implemented and shipped.
All insights, comments and decisions collect in one place. The Story shows up in different iterations, first in the Discovery track, later in the Delivery track, and only counts as finished once it is delivered and closed. The points for velocity count only then, too.
How this shows in the views
| Phase | Where | What you do there |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | Scope (Storyboard) | You create Initiatives, Epics and Stories and tell the story of your endeavor. |
| Discovery and planning | Prepare (Backlog Kanban) | You bring Stories from Idea via Draft to Ready and set their order in the Backlog. |
| Delivery | Build (Iteration Board) | The team works off Stories in fixed iterations, down to Workitems. |
| Overview | Insights | You see where the endeavor stands and when it is expected to finish. |
The Backlog Kanban makes the two phases visible: on the left the Discovery area (1) with the columns Idea, Draft and Ready, on the right the Delivery area (2) with Todo, Doing and Done.
On the Iteration Board both phases run in parallel within the same iteration. Two tabs separate them: Delivery Track shows the Stories being built, Discovery Track the Stories currently being clarified. Betterplan assigns each Story to the matching track automatically, based on its progress.
How to work with it
- Capture: Create an idea on the Storyboard, one sentence is enough. Place it under the fitting Epic.
- Clarify: Bring the Story to Draft and on to Ready in the Backlog. Don't jump from Idea straight to Ready: the path in between is the conversation. Open questions block Ready; resolve them or record them as deliberately accepted assumptions.
- Prioritize: Whatever is further along takes precedence over something earlier: a Story in progress beats one in draft. Only within a state does the top-to-bottom order in the Backlog set the priority, not the order in the Storyboard. See Prioritizing.
- Build: When an iteration starts, the Stories belong to it. The team breaks them into Workitems if needed and moves them across the board to Done.
- Close: After acceptance you close the Story, and its points count toward velocity.
Feel free to close Stories already in Discovery once it becomes clear they bring little value. That is the real purpose of this phase.
Background
The article The bravest sentence in Discovery explains why closing early is a good outcome.