What are Story Tags?

Howdy, Upstarts!

In some of my previous articles, I have discussed some of the most fundamental concepts involved in Agile development, SCRUM, or KANBAN: 1) User Stories and 2) Story Points.

User Stories are what you should use to define what you need your developers to do, and Story Points are what you should use to estimate how much work it will take for your developers to do it. But when it comes to organizing software development teams, there is a third concept that doesn’t get as much attention as User Stories and Story Points: Story Tags!

Story Tags are another powerful tool for managing software teams! So, I want to take some time to explain what they are and how you should be using them to boost your engineering organization!

… So, What are Story Tags?

A Story Tag is a label that you give to a User Story to classify and categorize it.

Think about a hashtag on social media that organizes posts and conversations by topic, and how easy it is to find new posts about the latest Netflix shows! Think about a library that organizes books by subject or field, and how quickly you can find a book on stone age art form Sub-Saharan Africa! Think about my desk at work that fails to organize anything at all, and how it takes me half an hour to find those notes I wrote from last Tuesday’s meeting!

Story Tags are how you group the tasks that your developers are working on into categories.

You Need to Use Story Tags!

You can’t build an engineering organization without organization, and Story Tags are the best tool in your toolbox for organizing the work of your developers!

If you aren’t using Story Tags, then your developers are not working from a cleanly categorized library, they are working from a messy desk covered in papers and old USB cords!

Story Points provide your first level of measurement for your development teams as they complete your User Stories. But if you only use Story Points by themselves, then these measurements are only able to give you how much work your teams can accomplish, and you miss out on additional data that can help you understand problems in your development process, or the locations of your technical debt, or opportunities to upskill your developers.

So the next step beyond measuring the total amount of work that your development teams can complete (i.e. only measuring the Story Points) is to start dividing those User Stories and attributing their Story Points to different things!

Using Story Tags to divide your work into categories will give you insights for improving your development process and for optimizing your technology product.

Story Tags are for Building Better Mouse Traps!

Your engineering organization is a Code Machine with the express goal of quickly producing high-quality code!

I want you to imagine that your engineering organization is a water purification plant! At one end, a bunch of dirty water flows into the purification plant; and then, the water flows through a series of pipes, tubes, and filters; and finally, a bunch of clean, clear water flows out of the purification plant! The purification plant has a lot of complex components and processes, but its primary goal is to take dirty water and turn it into clean water!

(Obviously, don’t imagine that your engineering organization is a Dasani water purification plant; otherwise, the metaphor breaks down…)

Every day, 1000 gallons of water flow into your purification plant, and every day 1000 gallons of water flow out of your purification plant. But then one day, only 900 gallons flow out of your purification plant. Good Lord! Somewhere in your plant, one of your pipes has started leaking! But which one? The only way for you to find the leak is to walk through the entire plant, along the entire length of your piping, to go and look for the leak!

But, what if your purification plant installed sensors that measure the flow of the water every 100 feet of your piping? Then when you see that only 900 gallons of water are flowing out of your purification plant, you only need to find the sensor that shows a measurement of 900 gallons instead of 1000 gallons and you know exactly which part of your purification plant leaks. That is much easier!

When you only measure Story Points without using Story Tags, then you are running a water purification plant without any water flow sensors. The only measurements that you take are how much water is flowing into your purification plant and how much water is flowing out of your purification plant.

Story Tags show you whats is going on inside your Code Machine!

Story Tags allow you to divide your work into pieces and empower you to identify which parts of your engineering organization can be improved and optimized! Without them, you are crippling your visibility into your engineering organization and you are only making your job harder.

Story Tags Show You the Leaks!

In this article, I wanted to explain an important tool for organizing your software development teams. I provided an analysis of what Story Tags are and why you should be using them in your software development teams and your engineering organization.

To build an efficient machine, it is important to measure how well each part of that machine is working. Without using Story Tags, you aren’t taking these measurements, so you cannot see the entire picture of how well your teams are functioning.

Every engineering leader should want to drive improvements in the way their software development teams operate to produce more code more quickly, and Story Tags are an important tactic in detecting problems early and iterating your teams’ processes.