Posts Tagged ‘User Stories’

User stories discussed

Last week I had the pleasure of running a user story workshop for a group of very experienced folk with a broad range of backgrounds and skill sets. We convened the workshop to discuss the challenges that present themselves when we apply user stories for the first time on a real project.

The conversation was broad ranging but, since a number of people have told me that attending the workshop was valuable, I’ll try to capture some of the key issues.

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Prioritising stories within a sprint?

In a recent post Karl Scotland drew my attention to this post by Craig Dickson on Agile DZone. Karl and Craig differ on their approach (when working with Scrum) to prioritisation of stories by the product owner within a sprint.

Craig has a valid concern that we might loose sight of our Sprint commitment if we have high and low priorities within the sprint, what if we don’t get to low priority stuff, well it was only low priority! He also raises concern over the degree to which the team is empowered if the Product Owner specifies a priority order for within the sprint.

By contrast Karl has his focus firmly on WiP (work in process), and through that lens the sprint is secondary to a focus on flow, prioritisation will encourage the team to focus on flow. I have some sympathy with this point of view.

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Splitting user stories

I should start this post with an admission – I do not claim credit for any original thought here. What follows is taken from my own notes and has been accumulated over a number of years. I most recently tweaked my own notes and the way I explain this stuff after hearing Jeff Patton’s talk from the UK Lean Kanban conference on infoQ.

The way I think of splitting user stories is through identifying axis. Some examples of axis are:

  • Steps in a workflow
  • Usability
  • Quantity of data
  • Asymmetric value
  • Stakeholder needs more »

Agile requirements – back to basics

Much has been written about User Stories however, it is still a subject that I find people struggling with.

In this post I intend to review what are the choices that we make that enable us to claim a requirements approach as agile and how can user stories (when applied well) help us achieve this agility.

An agile approach to requirements should

  • Defer investments
  • Support just in time elaboration
  • Encourage collaboration
  • Support planning

The most common approach to agile requirements is User Stories. A user story represents a need on behalf of a specific stake-holder. more »

Where am I?

 

May 2012
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