USER STORIES WORKSHOP

Course: USW

Duration: 2 Days

Level: I

Course Summary

Requirements define the functional and physical needs of a system or product. In a sense, requirements serve as the roadmap for product development, providing product development teams guidance for what is expected of the product.

Traditional requirements documents may not contain complete and accurate requirements due to rapidly changing business environments. This can result in product and system failures.

Extreme programming (XP) introduced the practice of expressing requirements in the form of user stories, short descriptions of functionality?told from the perspective of a user?that are valuable to either a user of the software or the customer of the software.

A common challenge with writing user stories is how to handle a product's non-functional requirements. These are requirements that are not about specific functionality (?As a user of a word processor, I want to insert a table into my document.?), but are rather about an attribute or characteristic of the system. Examples include reliability, availability, portability, scalability, usability, maintainability. Think of non-functional requirements as ?constraints? we put on the system.

In this workshop, you'll grasp the concepts, principles, and structure of Agile development and become empowered to execute on your plans for incorporating Agile techniques into your organization. User stories are part of an agile approach that helps shift the focus from writing about requirements to talking about them. All agile user stories include a written sentence or two and, more importantly, a series of conversations about the desired functionality.

User stories are short, simple descriptions of a feature told from the perspective of the person who desires the new capability, usually a user or customer of the system. They typically follow a simple template:

As a ,

I want so that .

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Topics Covered In This Course

Introduction

Introduction to the workshop
Identify the challenges you will face when implementing an Agile method
Plan for a successful transition from waterfall or other traditional software development approaches
Steps to creating a successful User Story Workshop
Introduction to ?EPICS?

User Stories Overview

What Is a User Story?
Where Are the Details?
How Long Does It Have to Be?
The Customer Team
What Will the Process Be Like?
Planning Releases and Iterations
What Are Acceptance Tests?
Why Change?

Writing Stories

Independent
Negotiable
Valuable to Purchasers or Users
Estimating Process
Small
Testable
Developer Responsibilities
Customer Responsibilities

User Role Modeling

User Roles
Role Modeling Steps
Identifying the Customer
Identifying Some Initial Roles
Consolidating and Narrowing
Adding Personas
Role Modeling

Gathering Stories

Elicitation and Capture
A Little Is Enough, or Is It?
Techniques
User Interviews
Questionnaires
Observation
Story-Writing Workshops

Working with User Proxies

The Users? Manager
The Development Manager
Salespersons
Domain Experts
The Marketing Group
Former Users
Customers
Trainers and Technical Support
Business or Systems Analysts
What to Do When Working with a User Proxy
Can You Do It Yourself?
Establishing the Customer Team

Acceptance Testing User Stories

Write Tests Before Coding
The Customer Specifies the Tests
Testing Is Part of the Process
How Many Tests Are Too Many?
The Framework for Integrated Test
Types of Testing

Guidelines for Good Stories

Start with Goal Stories
Write Closed Stories

Put Constraints on Cards

Keep the UI Out as Long as Possible
Some Things Aren?t Stories
Include User Roles in the Stories
Write for One User
Write in Active Voice

Estimating User Stories

Estimate as a Team
Estimating
Planning a Release
When Do We Want the Release?
What Would You Like in It?
Prioritizing the Stories
Prioritizing Infrastructural Needs
Selecting an Iteration Length
Creating the Release Plan

Planning an Iteration

Iteration Planning Overview
Discuss the Stories
Breaking into Tasks
Estimate and Confirm
Creating Epics
Product Backlog

Measuring and Monitoring

Measuring Velocity
Planned and Actual Velocity
Burndown Charts During an Iteration

What Stories Are Not

User Stories Are Not Use Cases
User Stories Aren?t Scenarios

Why User Stories?

Verbal Communication
User Stories Are Comprehensible
User Stories Are the Right Size for Planning
User Stories Work for Iterative Development
Stories Encourage Deferring Detail
User Stories Encourage Participatory Design

Potential Story Problems

Stories Are Too Small
Interdependent Stories
Goldplating
Too Many Details
Including User Interface Detail Too Soon
Thinking Too Far Ahead
Customer Has Trouble Prioritizing: Customer Won?t Write and Prioritize the Stories

Handling Non-Functional Requirements

Reliability, availability, portability, scalability, usability, maintainability, security, performance, robustness and so on.

Team Exercises

Case Study

What You Can Expect

This workshop will provide you a thorough understanding of User Stories and their benefits. You?ll learn a new outlook on the way you write and use User Stories. You?ll be introduced to practical examples of good and bad User Stories. You?ll take away the knowledge necessary for incorporating User Stories into your working environment.

At the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

Demonstrate how to create a product vision statement, so that you can establish a guiding light for the product, with the help of your stakeholders
Learn to capture stakeholder business needs
Demonstrate how to establish user roles, so that you can ensure that you don?t miss an important stakeholder?s business need
Describe the User Story format, so that you can clearly comprehend the importance of each section.
Understand the importance of quality Acceptance Criteria, so that you can produce effective User Stories
Practice writing user Stories, so that you are more comfortable when you start doing it for real
Explain how to tell a good user story from a bad one, so that you can create a better product backlog
Understand what the term ?epic? means; so that when you write stories you understand how they can be at different levels
Understand the concept of story mapping, so that you can use it as a method to gather User Stories

Who Should Take This Course

The User Stories workshop is for Business Analysts and Product Managers/Owners and anyone who will be involved in the writing of User Stories.

This course focuses on how to gather Agile requirements and document them as User Stories. This is a very hands-on course and features many exercises that solidify key course concepts. Whenever possible, real-world examples are brought in from the course participants work in order to jumpstart their next Agile project.

Recommended Prerequisites

None

Training Style

Instructor-led, group-paced, classroom-delivery learning model with structured hands-on activities and case studies.

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Every student attending a Verhoef Training class will receive a certificate good for $100 toward their next public class taken within a year.

You can also buy "Verhoef Vouchers" to get a discounted rate for a single student in any of our public or web-based classes. Contact your account manager or our sales office for details.

Schedule For This Course
There are currently no public sessions scheduled for this course. We can schedule a private class for your organization just a couple of weeks from now. Or we can let you know the next time we do schedule a public session.

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