Using ChatGPT for Agile Planning 📋

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Today's email is an excerpt from my book, P-AI-R Programming: How Al tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT Can Radically Transform Your Development Workflow (Amazon Link). (Gumroad Link). I'm sending it to everyone, not just software developers, in the hopes that showing you the power of AI for these types of things might inspire you to try it for other aspects of your personal and professional life.

I’m going to make an admission here. I am not a fan of project management tasks. I don’t like creating stories, grooming stories, doing project estimates, etc. I want to build working code and do it as fast as possible.

However, I do recognize the value of project management tasks. That’s where AI comes into play. AI can help make the process a little simpler and more pleasant by automating certain aspects of the project management process. For example, AI-powered tools can assist with story grooming by creating comprehensive user acceptance criteria.

This gets these tasks off my plate as quickly as possible, so that I can get to the more interesting job of delivering software. In this chapter, I’ll show you how I use ChatGPT for project planning.

Project Concept

I started by describing an application to ChatGPT. The application in question is the demo application from many of my books and video courses.

The application will store and manage the attendance for a single classroom. It will store the names and contact information for the class roster and the students’ parents. It will provide a way to add, edit, and remove students, as well as the ability to mark the students absent or present for a given day. The app will run on both desktop web, iOS, and Android. It will also connect to the device’s camera to add a photograph of each student.

I gave that description to ChatGPT and asked it “to write a marketing summary for it.” Here is its reply.

“Attendance Manager” is a multi-platform app that simplifies classroom attendance management. With its easy-to-use interface, you can quickly store and manage the names, contact information, and attendance records of students and their parents. The app features a photo capturing capability, which makes student identification quick and effortless. Whether you are on a desktop computer or a mobile device, Attendance Manager ensures that you have access to your class roster and attendance records anytime, anywhere. Experience the ease and convenience of attendance management with Attendance Manager!

How great is that!? Beginning with a dry application description, I got a decent description suitable for use as a starting point for a market brochure. More importantly, for my purposes, I can then build on that to help with the rest of the project plan.

Epics and User Stories

Next, I asked ChatGPT to use that description to generate my epics and user stories for this admittedly simple application.

Given that description, create a few agile epics that will help direct the development of the application. I envision three different visual screens for the application. A home page, a roster page, and a student details page. Add those to the epics and stories.

This is the output verbatim:

Student Information Management:
Epic: Manage Student Information
As a teacher, I want to be able to add, edit, and remove students and their parents’ contact information in the system.
As a teacher, I want to be able to view a class roster and search for specific students.
Story: Create Student Details Page
As a teacher, I want to navigate to the student details page from the roster page to add, edit, or remove student information.
As a teacher, I want to view a student’s photo, name, and contact information on the student details page.
Attendance Management:
Epic: Manage Student Attendance
As a teacher, I want to be able to mark students as absent or present for a given day.
As a teacher, I want to view the attendance records for a specific date range or for an individual student.
Story: Create Roster Page
As a teacher, I want to view the class roster and mark students as absent or present on the roster page.
As a teacher, I want to view the attendance records for each student on the roster page.
Multi-platform Support:
Epic: Ensure Cross-platform Compatibility
As a teacher, I want to use the application on a desktop computer, iOS device, or Android device.
As a teacher, I want the application to have a responsive design that adjusts to different screen sizes.
Story: Create Home Page
As a teacher, I want to view the class roster and navigate to the roster and student details pages from the home page.
As a teacher, I want the home page to display on all devices with a responsive design.
Photo Capturing:
Epic: Associate Photos with Student Profiles
As a teacher, I want to take photos of students using the device’s camera and associate the photos with their respective profiles.
As a teacher, I want to be able to view the photos of students when I am marking attendance or viewing the class roster.
Story: Add Photo Capturing Capability
As a teacher, I want to be able to access the device’s camera from the student details page to take photos of students.
As a teacher, I want to be able to associate a photo with a student’s profile on the student details page.

This is more than I would have come up with on my own, and the user stories are easily good enough to get started planning the project. Keep in mind that this took only a few seconds.

Next, let’s see what happened when I asked for some user acceptance criteria for these stories. I won’t show them all here, just enough to give you an idea of what it does.

Generate some user acceptance criteria for the stories in Epic 1 using the “given, when, then” syntax

Again, here is what it gave me:

Manage Student Information — Create Student Details Page
Given that I am a teacher using the application, when I navigate to the student details page from the roster page, then I should see an interface to add, edit, or remove student information.
Acceptance Criteria:
The student details page is accessible from the roster page.
The interface displays the student’s photo.
The interface includes fields for the student’s name, contact information, and photo.
The interface allows the teacher to add a new student, edit existing student information, and remove a student.
The changes made in the interface are saved in the system.
Manage Student Information — View Class Roster
Given that I am a teacher using the application, when I view the class roster, then I should see a list of all students in the class and their contact information.
Acceptance Criteria:
The class roster is accessible from the home page.
The roster displays the student’s photo, name, and contact information.
The roster allows the teacher to search for a specific student.
The roster is sorted alphabetically by student name.
Manage Student Information — Search for Specific Students
Given that I am a teacher using the application, when I search for a specific student on the class roster, then I should see the matching students and their contact information.
Acceptance Criteria:
The teacher can initiate a search on the class roster page.
The search matches the student name, photo, and contact information with the search query.
The search results are displayed in a list format.
The search results are sorted alphabetically by student name.

ChatGPT took care of one of the most tedious tasks in software development, at least from where I’m sitting. Is it perfect? Not at all. There are features and acceptance criteria I never asked for. I didn’t say anything about a search feature, but ChatGPT added it to my application. That doesn’t mean I have to add it.

There are a couple of ways to look at this. One is that it just suggested a feature I hadn’t considered, but maybe should have. The other is that I can simply ignore it or ask ChatGPT to regenerate the UAC without the search feature. Either way is a win for me.

It also didn’t write each of the acceptance criteria using “Given/when/then,” but otherwise I’m happy with what it gave me.

By the way, I did ask it to generate UAC without using the term “user acceptance criteria.” It tried to create “user access control” instead, which was a very different result.

Estimations

If there is a task most developers dislike more than generating stories and acceptance criteria, it would have to be estimations. Fortunately, I was able to get ChatGPT to manage that for me as well, at least partially, using T-Shirt sizing.

T-Shirt Sizing

In case you aren’t familiar with the concept, T-shirt sizing is a method of estimation that assigns relative sizes to tasks or features based on their perceived level of difficulty. The sizing is usually done using a set of labels, such as XS (extra small), S (small), M (medium), L (large), XL (extra-large), and so on, to indicate the relative size of each task.

The exact labels and their meanings may vary between organizations, but the goal is to provide a rough, relative estimate that can be used for planning and prioritization purposes. The method is named after the idea of T-shirts being different sizes, with a small T-shirt being easier to handle than a large one.

With that understanding, I asked ChatGPT:

Given the relative difficulties of those tasks and their UAC, generate a rough relative estimate for each using T-shirt sizing.

Manage Student Information — Create Student Details Page
Size: Medium
The task of creating the student details page involves adding and editing student information, which is relatively straightforward but requires a user-friendly interface. The user acceptance criteria (UAC) also include saving changes made in the interface, which requires a functional back-end. Therefore, this task is estimated to be a medium-sized task.
Manage Student Information — View Class Roster
Size: Small
The task of creating the class roster page involves displaying a list of students and their contact information, which is a relatively simple task. The UAC includes sorting the list alphabetically and allowing the teacher to search for specific students, which are additional features that can be added with minimal effort. Therefore, this task is estimated to be a small-sized task.
Manage Student Information — Search for Specific Students
Size: Small
The task of adding a search functionality to the class roster page involves matching student information with the search query and displaying the results. This is a relatively simple task that can be implemented with minimal effort. Therefore, this task is estimated to be a small-sized task.

What impressed me about the response is that it attempted to justify its estimates. With this as a starting point, I would feel a lot more comfortable creating some estimates for management. If nothing else, it gives the team a place to begin a longer discussion.

Fibonacci Estimates

While T-shirt sizing is often enough for the development team, management typically wants something a little more concrete. My team uses Fibonacci values.

The idea behind using Fibonacci numbers is that each number represents a rough estimate of the amount of effort required to complete a task or feature, and the gap between each number becomes progressively larger as the estimate becomes larger. This helps to avoid the use of overly precise estimates, which can be difficult to achieve and lead to unachievable expectations.

This method allows for the estimation of tasks with a high degree of uncertainty, where the exact effort required is not known. By using a set of standardized values, teams can make rough estimates that are consistent and easily understood across the organization.

I asked ChatGPT to rewrite its T-shirt estimates as Fibonacci instead. It generated almost the same text as before but with different values. I’m showing just those values here.

Manage Student Information — Create Student Details Page
Estimate: 5
Manage Student Information — View Class Roster
Estimate: 3
Manage Student Information — Search for Specific Students
Estimate: 2

Did you spot the difference? Using T-shirt sizing, the estimates were “medium,” “small,” and “small.” Using Fibonacci values, ChatGPT decided that searching for students was a little simpler than viewing the class roster.

That type of awareness is common for developers, but I didn’t expect it from AI.

Summary

ChatGPT can be used to write concise and clear marketing summaries, create agile epics and user stories, generate user acceptance criteria, and provide rough estimates. It can help streamline the process by providing fast and accurate responses. The use of ChatGPT in this way can help you achieve greater efficiency and consistency, especially if (like me) you don’t particularly care for these tasks.

I’ve been using this strategy personally and as a result, I’m enjoying the process more than ever before. I find staring at a blank screen to be hard, but I don’t mind rephrasing and refining the output ChatGPT gives me for these tasks.

If you got this far, thank you! I hope you are enjoying these weekly thoughts and that I'm
providing some measure of value. As I said above, feel free to reply with questions or feedback. Let me know if there is something you'd like me to touch on in the future.

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