User Stories

The basics of story mapping and how to scope a minimum viable product.

Story mapping is the part of the complex product management process where define what the problem is and why it exists. In this article, Christian Strunk shares how he used to create story maps and how he teaching others to execute them these days. You will learn the basics, and three levels of a user story map, along with how to build it in with a lean-agile mentality.

The whole point of the user story could be just to trigger a useful discussion.

In an interesting thought process, Daniel Pokrývka breaks down the user story artifact into its elements to identify the essential parts which can be captured. Then, in an attempt to generate a meta-template, priority is given to the value and motivation, then to the usage and user contexts, and finally to the problem. This results in a value story template, or a different approach to understanding user stories.

Understanding the what and the why of User Stories from a talk that is still one of the best explanations of it out there.

The video features Mike Cohn at the Norwegian Developers Conference making arguably one of the best User stories explanations ever. Mike believes that User stories are a requirement technique as they point you to the desired requirement when developing projects. He further explains that they help create a mutual connection between the business and the developers by obliterating problems like imbalance of power, imperfect schedules, and scarcity of resources. Delve into this video conference to learn more about User stories and how Mike explains them using Ron Jeffries's three Cs - Card, Conversation, and Confirmation.

An explanation of what agile requirements are, to help you writing and using user stories.

Agile requirements evolve through the lifetime of a product, since it is not possible to know all of them at inception. In this article, Alex Gray outlines what they are, how they are written and handled for emergent designs. He add tips for writing user stories, it's format and how to know if they are ready for development. You will learn how to outline your requirements in a clear, efficient and effective way.

Writing good user stories is harder than it sounds.

User Stories have the familiar format: "As a 'user' I want to 'perform an action' so I can 'achieve an end result'". This format is so to help product, design, and engineering folks in taking a user-centered approach to design. Janet Taylor proposes that simply relying in this format is not enough, as it is easily misunderstood and misused. The purpose of user stories is to create empathy, and she tells you what to do instead.

Nudging our definitions of stories towards less social complexity and/or less technical complexity.

A brief description of why project stakeholders should forgo the traditional method of estimating stories while the project is young as it leads to making commitments that later prove costly and a suggestion of the best way to about this for the project to thrive. We learn that when a project is young do not make estimates of the work but rather slice the work by understanding its complexity. Read the article to find out about how to simplify meetings, order stories to asses risks, and more.

Discussing the expected behavior of a product to prepare a development increment.

User Stories, the description of the next feature increment, are often best seen as a placeholder for a conversation. This conversation should take into consideration all the needed perspectives in order to make informed decisions, contrasting business, technical and quality issues as it progresses. Kent McDonald shares concepts from Behavior-Driven Development BDD to shed a light on what, when and who should be included.

Learn how a team was able to heal a small part of the business/development divide by listening to users and delivering small incremental work.

Incremental delivery is a concept where value is delivered in stages instead of as a single increment. Steve Kuo shares a real life example as to the difference this approach makes, and how it can improve trust and engagement of the end users. By delivering features that the users leveraged every day, small ideas became big improvements and change became intuitive. A very relatable example of how to evolve simple solutions by increments.

A Shared Understanding of value (and its boundaries) is hard, but great teams figure out how to keep their mental model accurate.

In Scrum, a story is small enough to fit into a sprint, while an Epic is a story that is too big to fit into a sprint. On the other hand, a Sprint is a time-box of one month or less during which a “Done”, useable, and potentially releasable product Increment is created. Thus as attributed by the interrelation, epics act as containers for business value and are truncated to form Stories that focus on the product's user functionality. John Cutler explains that instead of viewing epics as Sprint-constrained, we can consider them as business problems that can then be broken down and solved to align with the user benefits as the business inspects and adapts.

User stories are an Agile technique of defining product functionality and requirements.

User stories are short, simple descriptions of a solution that your team has come up with, told from the perspective of the person who is playing out the interaction. They are part of a larger epic that describes the actual problem to be solved and why you’re solving it. Although, they have taken a bit of a hit in the last few years though, as they’re slightly oversimplification, lack empathy for the user, and do not focus on the product outcomes.

Andrea Saez confesses that there is a better of writing user stories called gherkins. She details that give a full scenario that will help developers and testers understand both the outcome and the output of a particular user interaction.

Acronyms to help us create and remind us of the good characteristics of stories and project tasks.

Bill Wake notes that good user stories act like a pidgin language by simplifying a system for the customers to collaborate with the developers and work together towards the ultimate software goal. However, which characteristics define a good user story and the effectiveness of the tasks within the user story? The author explains the characteristics of the acronym INVEST and SMART in detail here citing how XP teams should use them to create a good software user story with effective tasks.

A technique for splitting user stories that helps teams view things from their comfort zone.

Learn how to use a technique to split user stories into smaller stories that help teams to visualise business workflows from different perspectives. It details six key steps of applying the User Story Hamburger that helps inexperienced teams break down stories into smaller tasks that still deliver incremental business value. The Hamburger method works well to teams that insist on breaking down a story into technical workflow or component tasks by helping them embrace division of stories into more achievable steps.

The definitive guide to splitting features & stories, including the latest versions of Richard Lawrence's popular story splitting flowchart.

The article outlines a definitive guide to splitting features & stories, including the latest versions of Richard Lawrence's popular story splitting flowchart. It gives us an in-depth understanding of user stories and why splitting them matters. Within the context, it details that splitting user stories into smaller valuable/manageable pieces allows teams to get high-quality feedback from the user's perspective. Read this guide to learn more about splitting user stories, attributes of good user stories, and how to compare them to vertical slides.

How to use vertical user story slicing as part of software development and agile scrum adoption.

Kim Poremski narrates how she worked with a Product Owner to improve efficiency in a team's backlog that relied on horizontally structured user stories by transforming them into vertical slices. Together, they defined vertically sliced features and stories that allowed the team to demonstrate incremental progress and achieve better outcomes. She adds that horizontal stories do not meet a well-informed story structure of role, functionality, and outcome as well as the INVEST criteria.

Using a combination of three roadmap practices

Product roadmaps are a great way to track progress, manage expectations, keep people informed and aligned, while fostering transparency. But often the roadmap gets overloaded with features instead of focusing on a high-level, strategic plan for the products' future development. Robbin Schuurman presents three different roadmap practices, with the pros and cons of each, and how to mix them together depending on your needs.