Writing the story of an application - The Hashrocket Blog. I work on story cards for a lot of projects each year at Hashrocket and also see a lot of backlogs maintained by clients and open source projects.
A notable difference that I find between healthy projects and unhealthy projects is the way in which stories are written. I am purposefully leaving out any discussion about managing and grouping stories at a feature set level but will cover that in a future post. Below is a break down of stories for an example book store that sells pdf’s the way I would story card buying a book and the two alternative ways that I see this get broken out the wrong way. Keep in mind that for different projects and project teams story composition will vary to a degree and this is not meant to be a set in stone prescription.
The Good (Interaction Driven Stories) The Bad The Ugly Users can buy books- list page- show page (generate cover images)- users check out (set up payment processing)-- card and security code- users can down load a book (set up pdf generation) Three Golden Rules to Finding a CTO. This article is not meant for Tech Guys – this article is for the legitimate Biz Guys, whether you’re a tech guy who’s decided to run the business-side of a project instead of the development side, or if you’re someone with great product vision.
I have watched many a biz guy hunt for a developer, and I’ve read many a job post for a developer, and it needs to stop. Rule #1: You don’t know how to hire a developer. You don’t have the technical background and managerial experience to know how to organize a development team – if you do, then you’re the CTO. If not, you need to find one. Only a CTO is fit to build a development team. But first, a story… Imagine if you will, that you are a non-technical startuper looking to jump on board a project.
CTO looking for Biz Guy for startup Great Startup tackling the *Insert Trendy Term* Space – beta product on the way and we need a sales guy to put his all into it. Don’t sell the 9to5, sell the adventure Three key points follow: What is a Biz Guy? I will be using the term “Biz Guy” often in this post – it is a non gender-specific term: I, more than most, understand that sentiment regarding Biz Guys.
I loathe the question “what do you do?” At social events – I fall back on being a blogger so I don’t have to say I’m a “Biz Guy.” I feel like the 3rd wheel at Startup Weekends, because i’m not ‘producing anything.’ I’ll never call myself a “product visionary” or a “big thinker,” but I sure do hate that Biz Guy is the best title I can give myself. Among the comments of yesterday’s post, the term “Biz Guy” was thrown out in many respects, referring to anything from incompetent marketers to product visionaries (depending on who you’re asking). I don’t want to go into when Biz Guys are and are not necessary (at least not today), but I thought I might take the time to talk about what exactly is “A Biz Guy” The “other” box, the N/A, the etc – much like he is described, the biz guy is ‘everything else’.