Hi guys, this week I got inspiration for the post from a conversation that I had with one of my colleagues. I was explaining him the book that I read during my holidays - “Drive“. We went through many topics, but the one we discussed most was about Casual Friday, let me explain what it is.

In case you are not familiar with the term, you can think of it as a relaxed work day, the day when people are already in anticipation of the forthcoming weekend :). In the context of our discussion this pertained to that specific time that Google made popular with its employees: when they can use their time to do whatever they want, of course, within the company activities, but not necessarily related to their on-going projects.

The conversation continued for some time when he suddenly said that he cannot really do that, he does not have time to try this Casual Friday. He then explained that each their iteration takes two weeks, so if he starts using a day per week off the project they will have only eight days left and then they cannot deliver much for that iteration. At first, I could not understand him, so I decided to dig into it…

I asked him, “How come you cannot deliver anything in eight days? How long do you take to finish a story?” However, when he told me that each story usually takes six to seven days, I understood their problem. Of course, if they take seven days to deliver a story and if something happens, say a small delay, it would easily take them the whole iteration to deliver that one story, but they will not have any time for Casual Fridays.

In my humble opinion, they are just accepting too large stories. It would make sense for them to break these large stories into smaller units so that they could have more deliverables at the end of the iteration. Then I suggested that he tries an experiment: they could start creating smaller stories, say two-day stories, and they could see how many stories they would accomplish within the iteration. If everything goes well, they could deliver up to four stories per iteration and still have their Casual Friday.

I cannot promise that this would immediately solve their problems and allow them to have their Casual Friday, but I think they might be one step closer to it, because I truly believe that smaller stories are much better than the large ones.

This was just one example that demonstrated how large stories can have a negative impact on the development work. Here you can find more examples that explain why smaller stories are better for your development process.

What is your opinion about it?