User Story Refresher Workshop
- 1. User Story Refresher Workshop Tips and techniques for writing smarter user stories Sasan Afsoosi, Enterprise Agile Coach May 2020
- 2. Agenda ❖ What’s user story? ❖ Why user story? ❖ INVEST model ❖ Product backlog ❖ Definition of done ❖ User story tips ❖ Vertical slices ❖ Given when then
- 3. What’s User Story User stories are short, simple description of a feature told from the perspective of the person who desires the new capability, usually a user or customer of the system. User stories are short, simple description of a feature told from the perspective of the person who desires the new capability, usually a user or customer of the system. As a <type of user>, I want <some goals> so that <some reason>
- 4. Why User Stories? Keep Keep yourself expressing business value, from the user perspectives Avoid Avoid introducing detail too early that would prevent design options and inappropriately lock developers into one solution Get Get to small enough chunks that invite negotiation and movement in the backlog Leave Leave the technical functions to the architect, developers, testers, and so on
- 5. User Story Readiness Guideliens: INVEST Independent Free from external blockage and can be delivered independently Negotiable Avoid too much detail; keep them flexible so the team can adjust how much of the story to implement. Valuable Delivers customer or business benefit Estimable Clear enough that team can estimate Small Large stories are harder to estimate and plan. Small enough to complete within sprint Testable Clear acceptance criteria to know when it’s good enough
- 6. Product Backlog Characteristics List of functionality, technology and issues Emergent, prioritized and estimated More detail on higher priority backlog Product Owner responsible for priority Maintained and posted visibly Derived from Business Plan or Vision Statement
- 7. Definition of “Done” When a Product Backlog item or an Increment is described as “Done”, everyone must understand what “Done” means. Although this may vary significantly per Scrum Team, members must have a shared understanding of what it means for work to be complete, to ensure transparency. This is the definition of “Done” for the Scrum Team and is used to assess when work is complete on the product Increment.
- 8. Three Tips for Writing Better User Stories Maintain and use Maintain and use clear product decomposition • Product vision • Capabilities • Epic • Story Write Write User Stories not Tasks • Focus on WHAT the team needs to do, and WHY they need to do it • Let team focuses on HOW to do it Conduct Conduct regular vertical slice “sanity checks” on all stories • Make time as a team to check stories in the backlog regularly
- 9. Vertical Slices Not all backlog items are user stories, but all user stories should be Vertical Slices
- 10. The Given- When-Then Format The Given-When-Then formula is an approach to guide the writing of acceptance tests for a User Story: ● (Given) some context ● (When) some action is carried out ● (Then) a particular set of observable consequences should obtain An example: ● Given my bank account is in credit, and I made no withdrawals recently, ● When I attempt to withdraw an amount less than my card's limit, ● Then the withdrawal should complete without errors or warnings