background preloader

INVEST in Good Stories, and SMART Tasks

INVEST in Good Stories, and SMART Tasks
(French) In XP, we think of requirements of coming in the form of user stories. It would be easy to mistake the story card for the “whole story,” but Ron Jeffries points out that stories in XP have three components: Cards (their physical medium), Conversation (the discussion surrounding them), and Confirmation (tests that verify them). A pidgin language is a simplified language, usually used for trade, that allows people who can’t communicate in their native language to nonetheless work together. User stories act like this. We don’t expect customers or users to view the system the same way that programmers do; stories act as a pidgin language where both sides can agree enough to work together effectively. But what are characteristics of a good story? I – IndependentN – NegotiableV – ValuableE – EstimableS – SmallT – Testable Independent Stories are easiest to work with if they are independent. Negotiable… and Negotiated A good story is negotiable. Valuable A story needs to be valuable. Small

Where do User Stories Come From? Part 1. | Robert Galen An Approach for Generating User Stories I see many agile Product Owners struggle with backlogs on their own for new projects. Quite often they insist on personally owning the backlog-which equates to authoring every story themselves. While this approach certainly works, it does require a lot of additional vetting time with their teams-bringing them up to speed on the story content. In his book User Stories Applied, author Mike Cohn discussed the notion of User Story Writing Workshops. I see way too much individualized story writing and too little group-based activity, so I wanted to spend some time in my next two posts discussing the dynamics and merits of User Story Writing Workshops. Getting a Facilitator One of the most critical success factors in the workshop is finding or declaring a facilitator. If you can't get someone who's independent, then go for facilitative experience. The first thing the facilitator will do is coordinate workshop logistics. Workshop Logistics Wrapping-Up

INVEST (mnemonic) One of the characteristics of Agile Methodologies such as Scrum or XP is the ability to move stories around, taking into account their relative priority - for example - without much effort. If you find user stories that are tightly dependent, a good idea might be to combine them into a single user story. The only thing that is fixed and set in stone in an agile project is an iteration backlog (and, even then, it can be broken). While the story lies in the product backlog, it can be rewritten or even discarded, depending on business, market, technical or any other type of requirement by team members. The focus here is to bring actual project-related value to the end-user. If a user story size cannot be estimated, it will never be planned, tasked, and, thus, become part of an iteration. Try to keep your user story sizes to typically a few person-days and at most a few person-weeks. Bear in mind that a story should only be considered DONE, among other things, if it was tested successfully.

Scrum Methodology & Agile Scrum Methodologies Use Cases or User Stories? Murali Krishna tells us: Failure to effectively transition to Agile development is often based on a fundamental failure to understand what a User Story is. The most important aspect of a User Story is that it's an independently *schedulable* unit of requirement (feature). The key to achieving the "independently schedulable" characteristic of a user story is that you express it in terms of how a "user" would use it. This leads you to a unit of functionality that's implemented end-to-end (UI to backend) that a user can actually interact with. Murali mirrors what many in the Agile community believe - that user stories are the only/best way to go and points us to an article by Mike Cohn, Advantages of User Stories for Requirements where Mike defines user stories: and then specifically contrasts user stories to the other well-known requirement technique, use cases: So it seems pretty clear that user stories are superior. Things aren't as clear cut as some would have us believe.

An E-Commerce Study: Guidelines For Better Navigation And Categories Scrum 3.0 and Organization 4.0 - impressions from a great evening with Boris Gloger at ImmobilienScout24 | On the agile path Today I had the opportunity to join a great and inspiring presentation by Boris Gloger talking about Scrum 3.0 and organization 4.0 (thanks to Immobilienscout24 for hosting a great event). With this post I provide a short summary of my notes and insights and links to further posts I already wrote about some topics presented today. Based on an initial blog post by Boris (DE) - we started today with a recap of the Scrum journey from Scrum 1.0, Scrum 2.0 and developed to today's Scrum status. Scrum 1.0 foundation by e.g. What did we learn? breaks between sprints don’t make senserole of PO was still a business analyst rolewhy 30 days and what does it mean - is it calendar days, what about Christmassprint planning and commitments did not work Scrum 2.0 roughly since 2004 - driving question, how could it really work? Scrum 3.0 ideas collected from the last 2-3 yearsall methods elaborated new best practices Product Owner Dailies NoMeetings One piece flow No estimates who still needs story point estimations?

Introduction to User Stories 1. Introduction to User Stories A good way to think about a user story is that it is a reminder to have a conversation with your customer (in XP, project stakeholders are called customers), which is another way to say it's a reminder to do some just-in-time analysis. In short, user stories are very slim and high-level requirements artifacts. 2. As you can see in Figure 1 user stories are small, much smaller than other usage requirement artifacts such as use cases or usage scenarios. Figure 1. Important considerations for writing user stories: Stakeholders write user stories. Figure 2. 2. Figure 3. 4. There are two areas where user stories affect the planning process on agile projects: Scheduling. Figure 4. 5. As you can see in the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) life cycle of Figure 5, there are several distinct "phases" or seasons in the life cycle (some people will refer to the agile delivery life cycle as a release rhythm). Inception. Figure 5. Figure 6. 6. Figure 7. 7. 8.

Using Paper Prototypes to Manage Risk There are no rewards in life for being the first one with the wrong answer. Imagine spending years building a product, only to learn that it missed the needs of its intended market. History is littered with the carcasses of failed products and the companies that built them - product development is indeed a risky business. We're a consulting firm specializing in user interface design and usability issues, so our initial contact with new clients is usually when they realize their product is in trouble. The company had spent considerable time and money to produce their first release, just to learn that they hadn't quite gotten it right. That's exactly what we helped them do. Day 1 We met with the entire development team. The first thing we did with the team was to agree on a profile of their most important type of user and the most important things that those users did with the product. Days 2 and 3 We completed the prototype by the end of Day 3. Days 4 and 5 Day 6

What powerful questions does Scrum help you answer? The video on powerful questions made me think about the deeper purpose of the various Scrum activities. Can I formulate Scrum as a series of Powerful Questions to be general enough, that they might be useful outside of software development? Here is the image I came up with and below are the questions I think each of the Scrum Activities and artefacts strives to help you answer. Sprint The Sprint is a container to limit ourselves to setting reasonable medium-term goals. Vision How will our efforts make the world a better place? Product Backlog What characteristics should our product have? Backlog Refinement What could we do to get us closer to our vision? Sprint Planning Part 1 - What is the best possible step forward, given what we know today? Daily Scrum What are our goals for the day? Sprint Review What have we accomplished or learned? Retrospective How can we work more effectively? Definition of Done How do we know a step was successful?

User stories in VS2010 MSDN Library Design Tools Development Tools and Languages Mobile and Embedded Development Online Services patterns & practices Servers and Enterprise Development Web Development This topic has not yet been rated - Rate this topic User story (Agile) Other Versions This topic has been merged with its parent, Agile process template work item types and workflow. Did you find this helpful? Tell us more... (1500 characters remaining) Thank you for your feedback Show: © 2014 Microsoft.

2 Days, 40 People, and a Bus: TLC + LSM at SFAgile 2012 Suggested Topics for Definition of Done Discussion Ken Schwaber and the rest of us advocate paying attention to what “done” means for a Product Backlog Item (PBIs, or “stories”). For a lot of programmers (like me), “done” often means “It works on my workstation!” The Scrum Master is charged with advocating a “done” that includes everything else needed to build a potentially-shippable product increment. So we need a cross-functional team. To avoid nasty surprises at the Sprint Review Meeting, I’d suggest initially attaching a definition of done to each PBI during the estimation process. If you’re using cards, write the definition of done on the cards. Scrum, a generalized framework rather than a defined process, doesn’t prescribe a particular definition of done. However, reading this may save you a couple iterations because the same kinds of things come up a lot. –mj Michael James Software Process Mentor Danube Technologies, Inc. For a general description of Scrum, see the Scrum Reference Card.

Related: