I'm in the early stages of developing a new project and I'm trying to pick up and apply agile techniques. In particular I'm trying to set up a Kanban approach with the development of this project.
For my last project I familiarised myself with Atlassian Confluence and it was a pretty immense help, so I've purchased a license for Jira and Jira Agile to go along with it.
Last week I held a meeting with some other members of our company who are the de facto customers of this project since it will be used internally. I discussed all the requirements they had and turned them into a set of user stories. Here are a couple of examples:
- As a developer*, I want to be able to create a test procedure which gives me control and monitoring of the motors in the test rig.
- As an operator, I want to be able to see the reports of tests that I run.
These user stories have been recorded in a Product Requirements page in Confluence and transferred over to a Kanban board in Jira. My board currently looks like this:
My problem is that these user stories are providing high-level descriptions for the core goals of the project. As soon as I start doing any work, I'll have automatically made progress in all of them and so I'd have to move all of them into "In Progress". And none of these user stories would be marked as done until I'm nearly complete with the project during which time they would all get marked as done in pretty quick succession.
It would be a lot more intuitive to me if each card on the board represented a small, simple task that was along the lines of "Implement this small piece of functionality" or "Investigate if this approach is feasible" - something I can assign to myself or someone else and expect it to get done within a few hours or days. How does an approach like that fit in with the idea of using user stories on a Kanban approach?
One thing I could do is create a series of sub-tasks for each story. The problem with this approach for me is that a lot of these tasks would be shared as a common requirement between most if not all of the user stories.
In brief, I've created a set of user stories and not sure what to do next. Have I made a mistake in creating these user stories or am I just not seeing the next step?
Edit
*by "developer" I meant "test sequence developer" i.e. one type of customer of the product.