Module #11 Stories Part 1

Stories are a key focus for Agile work and we have divided addressing them into two modules with this first covering user roles, story creation, and acceptance criteria.

Roles and Personas: Requirements sometimes talk about “The user …” which does not offer much information and even implies that all users are the same which is unlikely. This topic covers

• being more specific with user roles,
• brainstorming user roles, and
• beyond roles to user personas.

Story Creation: As the Agile way of beginning to define customer requirements, effective story creation is important. This topic covers

• what stories are and are not,
• classic story format and 3 C’s;
• story writing workshops,
• “DEEP” and “INVEST” acronyms,
• story “smells,”
• appropriate levels of detail,
• “epics” and their breakdown, and
• technical stories.

Acceptance Criteria: Since stories are not full requirements, a next level of detail comes with defining acceptance criteria which may, themselves, become further stories.. This topic covers

• acceptance criteria as “conditions of satisfaction,”
• what constitutes good acceptance criteria,
• who writes acceptance criteria,
• the “right” amount of acceptance criteria,
• an overview of requirements specification methods,
• an overview of requirements elicitation techniques,
• specification by example, and
• business-driven development (Gherkin format).

Module #12: Stories Part 2

Once stories are written and acceptance criteria are defined, there many be a need to divide stories in smaller pieces that can be accomplished in a single iteration and can be properly prioritized and estimated.

Story Splitting: Often, initial stories can be quite broad and suggest too much work than can be accomplished in a single iteration, requiring them to be broken into smaller subsets of stories. This topic covers

• why we split stories,
• how small must stories be,
• overview of many ways to consider splitting stories, and
• 10 specific ways to split stories.

Prioritization: A fundamental idea in Agile work is always to focus on the highest priority requirements still remaining to be implemented, but this requires that the customer set priorities so the team can do this. This topic covers

• many factors affecting prioritization decisions,
• many methods for prioritizing,
• the MoSCoW method,
• the (basic) Kano method,
• cost of delay prioritization,
• story mapping, and
• linear prioritization.

Estimation: Not often a favorite topic for individuals and teams, but expected in planning, Agile estimation is another thing done quite differently from traditional approaches. This topic covers

• estimation challenges,
• time-based vs relative estimation,
• story point estimation,
• planning “poker” estimation, and
• affinity (pointless) estimation.