Hello my fellow, lemons? I have this problem in my current project I’m out of clue how to approach it. Maybe someone had similar experience and can give an advice.
Our requirements captured in JIRA. Throughout years we accumulated thousands of user stories. Say suppose following naive requirements team knows about:
- Day 1: create home page
- Day 20: create profile page
- Day 50: add green footer to all pages
- Day 100: create admin page
Day 150: change footer color to blue
Now I’m doing refactoring (yes, I know, this is the actual problem) on day 400 and noticed that footer on profile page having green footer. Because requirements are just set of individual statements not consolidated with all history of system no one on the team knows why is that, is it bug or requirement did change on day 300 but we cant find it now.
When I worked in Waterfall we had BRD and FRD stating current actual desired state of system which was “reduced” from individual requirements which were coming in throughout project life. When in doubt devs can check FRD and not only know how system expected to behave but also which are other parts of the system that will be affected. How is it in Agile? To my understanding FRD is not a thing in Agile. Do I need to scan through hundreds of tickets and hope I didn’t miss anything every time i’m doing any non-trivial change to system?
Someone probably knows the answer. Ask around. This should include either customers or customer advocates. If nobody knows the answer, then do the simplest thing that accomplishes what you need in order to proceed. Sometimes that means doing nothing. If there are multiple ways to accomplish what you need, do the one that leaves you in a more flexible state for future changes. You can bring up your choices or decisions to team members if you need, possibly during a standup or just ad-hoc.
If you aren't empowered to take one of those steps, then you are in a dysfunctional environment, in that case, collect your salary and keep your head down, and if you are so inclined, try to find a new company or team to join.