User Stories: Making the Vertical Slice
Vertical Story Slicing is a challenging and intimidating concept. Gain an understanding of story structure and how to more effectively slice stories to maximize value, plus there’s a link to her webinar on the topic.
Estimating the Size of Scrum User Stories
In Scrum, the owner of the estimates is very clear. Only the people who do the work, i.e., the Team, have the right to offer estimates for the Product Backlog and Sprint Backlog items. However, like many things in Scrum, the framework leaves it up to each Team to decide on what is estimated during planning. Because Scrum Teams are self-organizing, they can choose to estimate duration, effort, size, complexity or anything else that makes...
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Why Use Cases Are Still Important…with User Stories
A while back, I made the claim in one of the Agile LinkedIn groups that writing use cases was one aspect of being a professional software developer. That naturally received a bunch of push back from people who felt use cases were too heavyweight. Many people claimed user stories are more than sufficient for most software teams. While I agree with most of the sentiments expressed about why user stories are superior, I still believe use cases are...
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How to Improve Your User Stories
Why does writing user stories have to suck so much? I recently heard from a colleague that they were looking for some ideas, tricks, tips and techniques to make user story writing more innovative so they can build a delightful product. Definitely a good idea, but running a good meeting where everyone is engaged, participating and using their brain is not going to create a delightful product all by itself. Creating a delightful product means...
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User stories vs user goals
The problem: Agile developers want user stories; product managers want to bring back stories from the market about users. What we REALLY need is to understand user goals. Is there a difference? Let’s see. User stories are one of the most misunderstood and misapplied artifacts of Agile development. As often happens when implementing any type of change, many of the good practices get thrown out along with the bad. For example, with RUP, requirements analysts strived...
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Writing Good User Stories
User stories are tool that originated from Extreme Programming and have become the de facto way Agile teams document and collect their requirements. There is a lot written on user stories (link, link, link), so I am just going to talk about what I consider important in writing good stories since I see a LOT of really bad ones out there today. For those who do not know, stories are a lightweight artifact that allows us to...
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User Story Hierarchy in Agile
This article is intended to be a quick reference guide to align your team to a common vocabulary around User Stories and User Story Hierarchy.
Transformation Success Stories Start with Trust
Transformation success — like a successful sales pitch — doesn’t begin by simply presenting a business case. It begins by looking inward, and asking yourself, “Does my team trust me?"
Relative Estimation with Reference Stories
Relative Estimation is the fastest and most reliable method for Sprint planning. Using historical data in the form of Reference Stories makes it even better.
[DELETE] User Story
I have written on user stories before, so please understand that I love user stories. When used thoughtfully, I feel user stories can be a very powerful way to create a collaborative dynamic between the business and product developers. User stories have the innate ability to rebalance the conversation between technical people and the business in a way that allows the business to steer development according to business customer needs, not technical implementation. What I hate, and...
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