Most agile software development team grapple with user stories as a technique for understanding what needs to be developed iteratively. This talk presents some techniques for uncovering useful user stories and how to slice them in a way to deliver value in small increments.
The definition of “Done” (DoD), which means that a feature is ready for delivery, is a concept often discussed in Scrum. In this blog post, George Dinwiddie discusses the concept of “Ready” that apply to user stories that are ready to be developed.
User stories and their format defined by Mike Cohn “As a , I want so that .” are a classical way to record requirements in Scrum project. In his blog post, Alan Klement discusses a new format that he called “Job Stories” with the format “When … , I want to … , so I can … .”
User stories and their size are often the basis for planning a Sprint in Scrum. You can use a relative estimation and planning poker or a more classical approach to define the effort for each user stories. As such, they are also the basis for the metrics of progress and the velocity of the Scrum team.
Agile practitioners are aware that Scrum has three roles: developer, ScrumMaster and product owner. In his book “Executable Specifications with Scrum”, Mario Cardinal also discusses how you can use the role notion in Agile to better understand stakeholders that have a different perspective, a concept that is also named “personas”.
If Agile approaches are tools that allows to deal with uncertainty and change, they have often little impact on the management mindset that still requires to have deadlines proposed with software development projects. In this blog post George Dinwiddie discusses the usage of user stories for planning in Scrum projects.
Agile approaches have few proposed specific rules or techniques that have become de facto standards. One of these technique is to use the “as a <type of user>, I want to <do something>, so that <reason>” format to define requirements as user stories. In this blog post, Jim Bird discusses the idea that this user stories format is not the best way to manage requirements.
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