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. 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. During JIT analysis/model storming with stakeholders. Figure 7. 7. 8. Translations Japanese
Attending a Scrum master training course … an event that started some critical thinking at the back of my mind - Part 2/2 - Willy's Reflections Continued from Attending a Scrum master training course … an event that started some critical thinking at the back of my mind - Part 1/2 which summarised the why I was on this course, some of my objectives (questions, scrum smells, etc.) and introduced changes to the Visual Studio ALM Rangers Scrum Poster. Day 2 … today was a phenomenal day and thanks to Chris, we had a very interactive day … we subsequently ran short on time and had to rush through the “slides”, but then the consensus was that the interactive nature was far more valuable. Most of today was spent going through planning and retrospective activities, including multiple teams, which kick-started the critical thinking even more. I do not have final answers to my questions as yet, but have decided to invest energy in this topic and possibly work on a whitepaper with a title such as “Schizophrenic scrum guide to distributed and virtual teams”. Watch the space … :) Your opinions and comments are welcome to the above!
Leonid Systems Introduction What’s agile? What are user stories? Agile is a set of development practices that emphasize structured, incremental, short cycle executions (usually two to six weeks each). The practice favors person-to-person communication and working software (or systems) over extensive documentation. If no one is writing detailed specifications and requirements, how does the development team know what to build and test? As a <user type> I want to <do something> so I can <derive a benefit>. “As a standard user, I want to see who just called me so that I can call them back.” Before you start writing stories, you should characterize your various audiences. What stories are you going to tell here? The stories we’ll review here are about Leonid’s customers’ customers- businesses that use cloud communications. How did Leonid create these stories? At Leonid, we’re constantly developing stories. How do we use these stories? Customer Product Design Customer Process Design Leonid Product Design End User
An Overview of the Scrum Process | IT-Zynergy ApS Scrum is a simple framework that does not demand any special tools or software. Here we explain how a project typically is run using Scrum. Product Backlog Before we can start to use Scrum on a project, there needs to be a Product Backlog. A project's Product Backlog is, in its most basic form, a list of everything that needs to be done in order for the project to finished. An example of an unsorted Product Backlog : Click here or on image to enlarge You can read more about creating and maintaining the Product Backlog here. Release Planning Once we have a Product Backlog the Product Owner can start to build a release plan for the project. The Product Owner needs to take a look at the Product Backlog and prioritise it with respect to the business value each item in the Product Backlog has for the project stakeholders. An example of a Product Backlog sorted by business value : Click here or on image to enlarge An example of a User Story : Click here or on image to enlarge The Sprint Daily Scrum
The Sprint Backlog - Example Sprint Task Board - International Scrum Institute Within the Sprint Backlog all activities required to complete the committed entries from the Scrum Product Backlog are stored. All entries have to be estimated on a person-hour base in order to track progress and remaining efforts. The Sprint Backlog is a living artifact and is updated on a daily base. If a team member starts to work on an activity his name is recorded within the sprint backlog. New activities can be added to the Sprint Backlog during the Sprint. At the end of the day all remaining efforts are updated and this defines how much work is left until the Sprint Goal is reached. The Sprint Backlog can be kept electronically within e.g. an Excel-Sheet or with cards on a task board. Example Sprint Task Board
Anatomy of a Sprint Backlog | Platinum Edge At our Certified Scrum Master training classes, Platinum Edge gets a lot of requests from students for an electronic copy of our sprint backlog template. Here is an Excel version of the template, along with a quick breakdown of each part. If you are not familiar with the sprint backlog, the sprint backlog is a list of the tasks associated with the current sprint. The sprint backlog is one of the three scrum artifacts. At the minimum, a sprint backlog should include: The sprint goal. We like to use the following template: Platinum Edge's sprint backlog template, which can also be found HERE, includes the following parts: A. The total number of working days in the sprint. o The formula in these cells multiplies the number of days in the sprint by the number of available hours per day each person has. o For example, Person A can work 35 hours a week, or 7 hours a day. The outstanding work (or backlog) is on the first vertical axis. E. J.
User Stories That Developers Can Actually Work With | Product Management Devout Agile evangelists will define a user story as a short, simple description of a feature told from the perspective of the person who desires the new capability. The user story will typically follow a simple template: As a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason>. And furthermore, while a product backlog can be thought of as a replacement for the requirements document of a traditional project, it is important to remember that the written part of a user story (“As a user, I want…”) is incomplete until the discussions about that story occur and the discussions are those that actually enrich the user stories with enough details that R&D teams can chew on. So much for theory and now for practice…. I have found that the concise user stories are simply not enough. Since all of the above is my day-to-day reality, at our company, are using the following guidelines for a user story template. Like this: Like Loading... Template, User Story
Crispin Parker's Blog A recent question in the Scrum for Team System Q & A site has highlighted that there is a lack of advice on how to accomplish backlog management with the SfTS v3 template. I’ve been working with the template for some time and it all seems very obvious to me, but taking a step back reveals that some of the details are not instantly discoverable. So I’ve decided to dust off live writer and explain how I manage a backlog in SfTS v3… Note: I briefly describe backlog management in my Getting Started With Scrum for Team System Version 3 blog post. Creating and sizing the backlog. One of the first steps in the project (long before any development work starts), is to get the ideas buzzing around in product owners head into a list of features that can be worked on by the team. SfTS v3 suggests that “Story Points” are used to describe the size of the backlog items. The comparative size of the backlog items is very important. Product owner creates the initial backlog wish list. What about themes?