Discovery and chapters, answered in full.
Finding out what is true before committing a quarter to it, and holding a body of work together while it is in flight.
- questions in this group, each answered in full
- 8
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- 2
- questions across the whole FAQ
- 316
8 questions on discovery and chapters, answered by Tenhaw, a UK AI consultancy and AI delivery partner based in London. Nothing here is a summary: each answer is the exact text from the page that owns it, and every group links back to that page for the context around it.
How to do discovery research
Answered on How to do discovery research, and rendered here in the same words.
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How long should discovery take?
Two weeks at most, and one week for anything under roughly £100k of planned value. The constraint is not research quality, it is the quarter: the epic has to ship inside the same twelve to thirteen weeks, so every day in research is a day off the build. If two weeks cannot answer the question, reduce the question to the single assumption that most threatens the number, or move the epic out of the quarter and say why.
Does every epic need discovery?
No. Discovery is for epics whose planned currency share rests on an assumption you cannot evidence. If the behaviour is already visible in your data, the value is a rate change you can calculate, and nothing you could learn would change the scope or the number, skip it and build. Running discovery on an epic whose answer is already known is the most common way a research phase turns into a parking bay.
Who should run discovery?
The product manager who owns the epic, with an engineer present for at least one session and a second person reading the raw evidence. Whoever wants the epic to succeed should not be the only one reading the transcripts. It is the same reason the kill condition is written and signed off before fieldwork rather than after the results arrive.
Can AI do the discovery for us?
It can do the synthesis, which is the slow part: reading forty documents and returning what they support, contradict and leave silent, with references. It cannot be the only reader. Models compress away the outlier, and the outlier is often the finding. Ask for file and line references, open them, and treat anything without a traceable source as not yet true.
How to write a chapter
Answered on How to write a chapter, and rendered here in the same words.
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Can a chapter have chapters of its own?
No. Chapters are the last level. A chapter you cannot finish in two days is telling you the seam is in the wrong place, or that the parent should have been more than one story. Move the seam first, and if that does not work, stop and take the story back to product rather than inventing a level below.
Do chapters get story points?
No. Points stay on the parent story, and that story keeps the size it was given before the build started. Size chapters in days, for sequencing only, and never sum those days back onto the story. The moment chapter sizes feed your velocity, the throughput data that produces your p50 and p85 stops being comparable across quarters.
Does product need to approve chapters?
No. The developer creates and closes them, and they should still be visible on the board so the chain from chapter to story to epic to outcome holds. If product is being asked to make a call on a chapter, whatever is under discussion is user-visible and should have been raised as a story.
What if a chapter turns out to be user-visible after all?
Convert it. Raise it as a story under the same epic, get product approval, and let product decide whether it belongs in this quarter or the next. Do not ship a user-visible change under a chapter because the branch and the flag happen to be there already: that is exactly how work disappears from the board product reads.
316 questions, grouped by subject
Every question answered anywhere on tenhaw.com sits in one of 39 groups. This is one of them.
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