We all know the “Definition of Done” used in Scrum for items that should be potentially shippable to the customer at the end of the sprint. In his book Essential Scrum, Kenneth Rubin discusses the “Definition of Ready” that applies to product backlog items that should be ready to be developed before the start of the sprint.
The creation of Agile approaches was also a reaction against huge and useless requirements documents, either textual or using modeling techniques like UML. All the values of the past should however not be discarded in the requirements activity. In his book “Agile Software Requirements”, Dean Leffingwell explains how user stories are different from use cases and software specifications.
The first principle of Agile manifesto says “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” But, Is our highest priority to delight our customer, or to delight our sponsor. Do we understand who the real customer is and behave accordingly?
Story mapping is a technique invented by Jeff Patton that order user stories along two independent dimensions. The “map” arranges user activities along the horizontal axis in rough order of priority. On the vertical axis, it represents increasing sophistication of the implementation. In his blog post, Sunit Parekh explains how you can apply story maps to build your product backlog in a visual way.
Agile requirements are a key success factor for Scrum projects. Many people criticize the minimalist format of user stories, often forgetting that they are mainly a support for a conversation and don’t have the objective to fully document requirements. In this article, Paul Raymond discusses how classical use cases can be use to expand user stories during requirements elicitation in Scrum sprints.
Written by South African Agile coaches Samantha Laing and Karen Greaves, “Coach’s Guide to Agile Requirements” is a book on how to teach the concepts of Agile requirements. It provides a complete plan to run a workshop where people can learn how to elicit, refine and organize requirements in an Agile way.
User stories are often misunderstood as small bits of requirements that help postpone analysis, but that’s not what adaptive planning should be about. Adaptive plans help organisations turn a changing landscape into a competitive advantage, react faster than the market and accelerate product discovery.
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