TELLING STORIESScrum stories as collaborative conversations

We all know the theory...

• Good Stories should be:

• Independent

• Negotiable

• Valuable

• Estimable

• Testable

• ...but in practice it’s often difficult

Product owners as novelists

• Creative

• Passionate

• Perfectionistic

• Constantly on deadline

• Dedicated

• Misunderstood

• Lonely

Product owners as bards

• Creative

• Passionate

• Open to change (“riffing”)

• Live in the moment

• Have perspective

• Seek to understand

• Involve their audience

That makes good stories...

• Conversations...

• Highly malleable...

• Collaborative...

• Good enough...

• ...not manuscripts

• ...not immutable

• ...not solitary

• ...not perfect

That makes good stories...

• A product of understanding...

• Open

• A song that you can sing along to...

• ...not the source of understanding

• ...not self-contained

• ...not a novel that you get lost in

Very pretty – but how do I use it?

• (good) conversations typically aren’t one sided

• Ask your users / customers

• Ask your peers

• Ask your developers

Asking your customers

• Resist the urge to jump straight into features

• Try to find out what their problems are

“It takes so long to load a new order”

“I have trouble finding other bloggers”

“My friends want to comment but they don’t want to have to sign in”

Asking your customers (2)

• Ask as many of them as you can

• Enable them to talk to each other

• Ask them questions in return

– “Would having all the form elements on one page make loading products quicker?”

– “Would enabling search by username help?”

– “Would you like to allow anonymous comments on your blog?”

Asking your peers

• Find out if their customers have similar problems...

• ...and how (if) they solved them

• Use social media:

– Linked.in

– Forums

– Blogs

Asking your developers

• It’s a discussion right from the start

• They may know better (or have better ideas)

• Be prepared to split, combine and scrap at a moment’s notice

• There’s a difference between vague and open

• INVEST is a test, not a starting point

Good stories have...

• Great characters

(user modelling)

• A coherent plot

(product backlog)

• Surprise twists and turns

(inspect and adapt)

Horror stories

• “Create Solution”

• “As a user I want the database optimised”

• “When I publish articles that I’ve re-edited after publishing they don’t get published immediately”

Fairy tales

• “As a user I want an advanced payment gateway that processes payments very fast”

• “As an administrator I want a mobile console that immediately alerts me of any abuse via SMS and lets me block the person’s IP”

Epic poems

• “As an advanced user I want a contact management interface with three buttons: Create, Update and Delete and a list of my contacts with checkboxes, names, email addresses and phone numbers with a sort option for each column”

Good stories...

• “As a reader I want to be able to browse through a blog's archive pages”

• “As an Administrator I want the system to send a registration email to a new user so that their email can be confirmed by way of activating their account”

• “As an author, I want the spell checker to ignore words with numbers so that only truly misspelled words are indicated"

Thanks to: David McLean and Michael James

Scrum is...

• ...a certainty engine

• ...about overcoming fear

• ...eating elephants one bite at a time

• ...about the journey

• Your stories aren’t the maps...

• ...they are the conversations along the way