Writing Effective User Stories

Intelligent People. Uncommon Ideas.

11

Writing User Stories Effectively

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Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike Noncommercial

By, Janeve George [email protected]

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http://wiki.directi.com/

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22Creative Commons Sharealike Attributions Noncommercial

Few Instruction

• It's a workshop not a presentation !!!

• Parking Lot

• Perks


Overview

• What are User Stories?

• Some interesting BuzzWords

• The story of writing User Stories

• User role modeling

• Gathering User Stories

• Managing Epics and Tiny Stories

• Pros and Cons of User Stories

• User Stories gathering workshop

• References


What are User Stories?

• It is the primary development artifact in XP/Agile development methodology

• High level requirements document

• Focuses on Who, What and Why of a feature and not How

• 3Cs of an User Story (coined by Ron Jeffries)– Card: A brief description– Conversation: Further information of the User Stories– Confirmation: Test to confirm completeness and

acceptance







• A well-written User Story follows the INVEST model (coined by Bill Wake):– Independent– Negotiable– Valuable– Estimable– Small– Testable

• User stories can describe– Feature– Non-Functional Feature– Bug Fixes


Some Interesting BuzzWords

• The Customer Team

• Epics

• Themes

• User Role Modeling

• Story Writing Workshop

• User Proxies


Story of writing User Stories

Brainstorminginitial set ofUser Roles

Organize the set of

User Roles

Consolidate theset of

User Roles

Refine the set of

User Roles

Choose one User Role to start with

Refinedset of User Role

Write as manyCards as

possible for the User Role

Discuss and refine the set of

Cards

Refined set of User Stories

Prioritize for iteration

Compile a reliableset of

Confirmations

Pin down everyvaluable

Conversation

Step in process

Development Artifacts


User Role Modeling

• User Roles– Various types of users

• Role Modeling– Brain storming– Organizing– Consolidating– Refining

• Personas– Imaginary representation of an User Role– Could use pictures too

• Extreme Characters


Gathering User Stories

• User Interviews– Select right interviewees– Ask open-ended, context-free questions

• Questionares– Best if there is a large user population– When you need answers to specific questions

• Observation– Best fot In-House developments

• Story writing Workshops– Effective during the initial phase of the project / release


Guidelines for good User Stories

• Start with Goal Stories

• Slicing the cake

• Write closed stories

• Size it for the Horizon

• “I as a (role) want (something), so that (benefit)”

• Colored cards


Managing Epics and Tiny Stories

• Epics are too large to estimate and can be split into multiple stories

• Epics represents– Complex functionality– Placeholders for low priority stories

• Types of Epics– Compound Stories– Complex Stories

• Different ways to split Epics– Various small actions in the Epic– Along the boundaries of Data– Depending on complexity


Managing Epics and Tiny Stories

• Tint stories are too short

• Its better to– Combine multiple tiny stories– Group them into Themes


Creating User Stories

• Sequentially numbered

• Customer Focused– Written from a User's perspective– Better if written by the user– Avoid technical jargons

• Shouldn't be too short nor too long

• Should be complete and testable

• Should be able to implement by two people in a single iteration

• Avoid infrastructure, technology or service elements


Pros and Cons of User Stories

Short and Easy to modify as in when requirements changes

Allow projects to be broken into small increments Easier to estimate the development effort Completed User stories can go for development It drives the creation of Acceptance tests Initial learning curve They require close customer contact Rely more on competent developers


References

• User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development by Mike Cohn

• http://www.agile-software-development.com/search/label/user%20stories

• http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/vaibhav/good-user-story-invest


1818

Questions???

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1919

Online Library PortalA User Stories gathering workshop

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2020

Retrospective!!!

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Technology

Writing Effective User Stories