Capabilities are the things we talk about with our stakeholders, and we talk about them in the stakeholder’s language. Strictly speaking, capabilities are seldom of concern to the development team, as the developers will be working on stories, which we’ll discuss later in this chapter. Capabilities far too often too big, hard to validate chucks of work, so it is not something we want to feed our team directly as an item of work. The reason is simple, large chunks or difficult to validate chunks of work lead to elongated feedback cycles and this is what got us into trouble in the first place.

Our development is being done to acquire those capabilities for the stakeholders, and therefore we must be able to talk about capabilities with our stakeholders. Capabilities are the language the stakeholders are thinking in and it’s is what they will use to understand the product we have built.

As we know, stakeholders can ask for virtually anything. Therefore, capabilities can be virtually anything, from small bugs that he be fixed to extremely large wishes and dreams. For example, each of the following statements describes a capability:

• Remove the extra linefeeds in the presentation of the list of flights on the “Choose a Flight” page (a bug);
• I want to be able specify that I need a special meal for my flight (a new feature); and
• Make it faster (an extremely large, ambiguous request).

What’s important to know about capabilities is that the priorities of the capabilities derived from the stakeholders, even though they may be modified by dependencies that the developers see. Since scrum is all about having a prioritized list of things to work on, we can see that most of the priorities that we derive from the stakeholders.

What we are usually trying to deliver in a release is a releasable capability. This leads to concepts that we find in the literature such as Minimal Marketable Feature (MMF), Minimal Releasable Feature (MRF), and so on. Even though I won’t discuss it, I think that for scrum what we really need to produce is Minimal Demonstrable Features (MDF), as the basic concept of scrum is to inspect and adapt, so we need to produce capabilities that we can demonstrate in order to get feedback.

In particular, we will discuss the following terms: capability, chore, story, epic, and task. There tend to be natural comparisons and pairings in this set; for example, capability versus chore, stories versus epic, and story versus task. Each of these issues will be discussed as we go along.

But first, a quick review of fully know about Backlog Items, or PBIs. Basically a backlog items is anything the lives on the backlog; it can represent work to be done, issues to be discussed, or problems that we have. In any case, a backlog items is a token for future conversations, that progress from the moment we know about the backlog item until the work it represents has either been completed or discarded.