Time for a fun exercise: The Elephant Carpaccio Facilitation! This exercise practices breaking down user stories in… smaller user stories, and even smaller user stories, and then even smaller user stories.

The main task is to take a simple program, in the example a simple receipt calculator, and break it down into as many small requirements as possible. Yes, if your first iteration is more than “an executable program doing nothing”, then you are thinking too big. Seems quite fun to do.

I like how these very small slices still must be user-focused: There is no “technical” slice just for setting up frameworks and stuff. Every slice delivers a (tiny) amount of value to users, and they can still turn up to be very, very small: The exercise allocates 7 minutes of implementation time per slice. That’s quick programing.