Teams that practice the principles from the Agile Manifesto acknowledge that many project failures are often due to poor requirements gathering, analysis and planning. They accept that traditional requirements documents may not contain complete and accurate requirements due to rapidly changing business priorities and believe it is a fallacy to attempt gathering all requirements at the beginning of a project.
Simply adhering to the basic Agile framework may not be enough for some teams to start realizing the benefits that the Agile philosophy has to offer. In the cases that teams are struggling to achieve increased productivity, greater quality, faster delivery and ultimately improved customer satisfaction we typically find a gap within the team's product backlog – specifically the quality of the user stories within that backlog.
This two–day course will give you hands–on experience with techniques for writing better user stories and capturing the additional details an Agile team needs in order to be successful. Explanatory lectures and demonstrations, combined with practice exercises will provide you with the experience needed to create user stories that will propel your team to the next level of Agile maturity.
What You Will Learn:
- Capitalize on the benefits of using Agile methods to communicate requirements
- Understand the characteristics of a well-written user story
- Build a better backlog through the definition of detailed acceptance criteria
- Employ a variety of techniques for identifying user stories
- Identify gaps not usually found or corrected in requirements gathering
- Decompose user stories to an atomic level
- Leverage strategies for elaborating on requirements over time
- Apply different techniques for supporting user stories
Immediate Benefits:
- Practice applying techniques for writing better user stories
- Demonstrate how user stories within into the Agile framework
- Learn how to collaborate on requirements within an Agile operating model
- Understand how to keep requirements focused on the customer
- Obtain practical knowledge that will allow you to improve the performance of your Agile team
- Gain exposure to IIBA® BABOK® defined techniques that can be used for elaborating and supporting user stories
- Improve your understanding of how to manage your time during an iteration to ensure the backlog is well groomed
- Explore the elements and attributes of well-written user stories
- Distinguish between work products and deliverables
- Discover the difference between themes, epics, and user stories
- Increase collaboration on user stories to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of Agile planning
- Help your organization maximize the amount of work not done by accurately defining long-lasting artifacts
- Identify ways to support user stories with Business Rules, Constraints, and Assumptions
- Clearly understand differences between user stories, non-stories, and spikes
- Hands-on experience writing and improving acceptance criteria
- Discover real-world tips and tricks that have helped other Agile practitioners write better user stories
- Enhance your skill-set to improve shared responsibilities across roles within the Agile team
- Overcome common pitfalls and traps encountered when writing user stories
Course Outline:
Section I: Remembering Traditional Requirements Prior to the deep–dive on User Stories, it is important to set context related to traditional requirements documentation and elaboration. Additionally, it is important to understand that authoring and elaborating user stories requires many of the same skills and techniques used when detailing requirements for a waterfall project. During this section we will cover:
- Types of requirements and business analysis activities
- Why it is a recipe for failure if you attempt to identify all product requirements at the beginning of a project
- How traditional business analysis activities align with Agile
Section II: User Story Overview Agile focuses on the customer, embraces the ever–changing nature of business environments and encourages human interaction in delivering outstanding software. In this introduction, we'll discuss the following:
- What is User Story including it's parts and components
- What Acceptance Criteria are and why they are critical to a user story's success
- The benefit of articulating requirements as user stories
- How user stories fit into the Agile framework
Section III: Pre–Conditions for User Stories Before an Agile team can begin writing and elaborating user stories there are things that must be in place. During this section we will set the stage for future class exercises by creating a shared understanding of the following:
- A sample product vision
- A sample product roadmap
- Sample product user roles
Section IV: Writing User Stories Well In order for an Agile team to succeed it is critical for the product backlog to be populated with well-written user stories. During this section participants will engage in discussion and hands–on activities that cover the following topics:
- Characteristics & Attributes of Well Written Stories
- Functional vs. Non–Functional Requirements
- Aspects of quality Acceptance Criteria
- Themes vs. Features vs. Epics vs. User Stories
- Distinguishing between Non–Stories & Spikes
Class Exercises: Based on the Vision, Roadmap and User Roles outlined in the previous section, participants are asked to complete a story-writing workshop.
- Story Writing Workshop: Based on the Vision, Roadmap and User Roles outlined in the previous section, participants are asked to complete a story–writing workshop.
- User Story Peer Review: Taking the user stories written during the story–writing workshop as well as a list of user stories provided by the instructor, participants pair–up to review stories, iterate on them and ultimately improve upon them.
- Acceptance Criteria Peer Review: Participants are asked to independently write acceptance criteria for a set of user stories and then pair up for a peer review before presenting acceptance criteria to the entire class for group discussion.
- User Story Decomposition: Participants are given a set of user stories in addition to the stories they have produced and are lead through the steps to assess the size of the story and the ability to slice it into smaller stories.
- Story Type Identification: Participants are given a set of stories to review. They are asked to identify the type of story (User Story, Non–Story, Spike) as well as re—write any stories that are camouflaged to be another type of story.
Section V: Supporting &Elaborating User Stories While a Product Backlog of user stories is a complete list of desired elements, or requirements, for the product – it is not a complete Requirements Specification. User stories alone are not enough. In this section we will discuss a variety of requirements modeling techniques teams can use to provide the right level of detail needed for successful product delivery.
- Assumptions, Constraints &Dependencies
- Business Rules Analysis
- Data Dictionary &Glossary
- Data Modeling
- Scenarios &Use Case Modeling
- Context Diagrams
Class Exercises:
- Words are Not Enough: After following a set of instructions provided to the entire class, participants gain an understanding that words alone are not enough for providing requirements detail.
- Abstracting Business Rules: Participants are provided a set of user stories and supporting documentation and asked to abstract the business rules as well as brainstorm and identify new business rules.
Section VI: Techniques for Identifying User Stories It is not enough for a Product Owner & team to take a brainstorming approach to writing user stories. There are a variety of standard business analysis techniques that can be used to help build a comprehensive backlog. The techniques that will be discussed include:
- Document Analysis
- Benchmarking
- Interface Analysis
- Prototyping
- Decision Analysis
- Process Modeling
- Functional Decomposition
- Story Mapping
Class Exercises:
- Process Modeling & Decomposition: Participants are provided a basic scenario and asked to model a business process and then use the technique of story mapping to decompose the process into user stories.
Section VII: Preparing for & Executing Iterations There is an appropriate level of detail about the user stories that is needed for a team to properly complete Iteration Planning activities on Day 1 of an iteration. During this section we will discuss strategies for ensuring the user stories in your product backlog are ready for execution.
- Backlog Grooming
- Story Writing Workshops
- Story Grooming Workshops
- Story Review Sessions
- Requirements Verification vs. Validation
- Determining what & how much to document
Section VIII: Alignment with Traditional Requirements User Stories are most certainly a transformation in the way software professionals approach requirements. During this section we will begin a review of the course curriculum by comparing strategies for writing user stories with traditionally defined requirement types and business analysis techniques.
Section IX: Retrospective on User Stories Using Agile Methods – Retrospectives are a key practice in Agile. We will take an opportunity to review our learning collectively and how we can improve.
Class Exercises:
- Success Factors: Participants review and discuss each success factor identified on Day–1 of the course in order to determine if each individual's objectives were met.
- Improvement Plans: Participants answer three specific question in order to explore techniques and strategies they plan to leverage as soon as they are back on the job.
- Course Feedback: Participants answer three specific questions about the course in order to provide the instructor with insight about the course curriculum and delivery of the class in order to improve future classes.
Section X: Real&daWorld Practice Taking the learnings from the course, we apply techniques and strategies to requirements and examples provided by participants.
Class Exercises:
- Story Creation & Grooming Workshop: Participants are asked to provide real–world requirements or user stories that the class can critique and collaborate on.
