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We are trying to implement Agile methodology in our development environment. Does a story require a start and end date OR is it purely applicable to a Sprint?

-Alan-

Alan B
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What do you mean by "end date"? The date you expect to finish the story (the dreaded Deadline) or the date you actually finish the story.

I'd say stories do not have a "date I expect to start/end this story" in Scrum². What you have instead is "the sprint that the team commits¹ to taking on the story". This is like an end date as you get an "all being well it will be released at the end of this sprint" but it is less finely grained as all work committed to at start of the sprint will, if all goes well, be released at the end of the sprint. You also don't get that information until the team actually commits to it.

You also have the estimated size of the rest of the backlog and the teams velocity. This can give a guide to when the story will be started. But it is a guide to a sprint, not a hard and fast date that you will pick up this story.

So what do you need the start/end date for? Once you know that you may find one of the other metrics Scrum/your flavour of Agile will provide you with the data you want. Or find that the data you want and Agile don't work together.

1) I've noticed a trend away from "committed" as it sounds rather fixed when it really means "we will try to get it done by then".

2) Scrum is only one of a ton of different Agile methodologies and while many people feel they have the One True form of scrum it would properbity be easier to get everyone to agree on the One True Emacs Bindings that the One True form of scrum. Some implementations of Agile or Scrum may have deadlines.

Michael Lloyd Lee mlk
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There are no start and end dates on stories.

Stories are bits of value that may (or may not) be implemented in your application.

In Scrum the decision to implement a story is taken at the sprint planning meeting where the story is moved into the specific sprint backlog that is being planned. Sometimes though stories are split at this point so a particular (original) story may actually only be partially implemented or implemented at different times.

So in a sense the "start" and "end" date of a story are the start and end dates of the sprint it is implemented in, with the caveats above.

Sklivvz
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Much like the others have said a user story will get its start date when you start work and the finish date will be when you are done. I think you maybe looking for an estimation on how long the story will take to complete - if that is the case then usually I put them into buckets of 1hr 4hr 8hr. If they don't fit into those categories you may need to rethink the complexity of your user story because it could be a large task that you are dealing with and require a user epic... which is just a larger story.

Donald Harris
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