Agile & Scrum Practice Question 9: Invest Independent Stories
Agile & Scrum · Test 1 · question 9 of 10
A Product Owner notices that the story "Show order total including shipping" can't be started until the story "Calculate shipping cost" is finished, and the reverse is partly true as well; the two keep having to be scheduled together in the same Sprint. Which INVEST attribute are these stories most clearly missing?
Show answer and explanation
Answer:
INVEST, coined by Bill Wake, stands for Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small and Testable. His description of Independent: "we'd like them to not overlap in concept, and we'd like to be able to schedule and implement them in any order." Two stories that have to be ordered or scheduled together fail exactly that test. The usual fix is to combine them, or re-split them along a different line (e.g., one thin end-to-end slice with a flat shipping rate).
- B is wrong: Negotiable means a story captures the essence rather than a fixed contract of details. Nothing in the scenario says the details are locked down. - C is wrong: both stories clearly deliver something a customer cares about. - D is wrong: an order total and a shipping cost are both easy to verify with concrete acceptance tests.
Reference: INVEST in Good Stories, and SMART Tasks (Bill Wake)