THE ART OF SLICING & DICING USER STORIES

@RachelCDavies

A WORKSHOP IS LEARNING THROUGH YOU DOING SOME WORK ..

RACHEL DAVIES Agile Coach @Unruly Media, London

Started as software developer in 1988… …Consulting, designing, engineering, leading, coaching, training…. Co-author of first book on “Agile Coaching” in 2009.

ABOUT UNRULY MEDIA Unrulymedia.com

ABOUT YOU

WORKSHOP AIMS

! What is a “user story”

! What is a “persona”

! Why is a persona valuable

! Try story splitting

! Not covering estimation or prioritization or implementing stories

What is a User Story?

A user story is a short description of a system feature that is:

“…understandable to customers and developers, testable, valuable to the customer and small enough so that the programmers can build half a dozen in an iteration.”

Kent Beck, 2001

3C’S

"  Conversation between customer & developers

"  Card notes of story & tests on index cards

"  Confirmation tests that show story is complete

•  Ron Jeffries, Xprogramming.com

Find out more .. Talk to users &

stakeholders! In person or hangout/chat

START WITH A CONVERSATION

QUESTIONS HELP FIND CONTEXT

Ask questions to uncover the user stories.. •  Who will use it? •  What problem are they trying to solve? •  What’s their goal? •  Why is this valuable to them? Understand this before diving into solution

details

USER STORY FORMAT

EXAMPLE USER STORY

EPICS?

Old saying “A bird in the hand, worth two in the bush” Look for ways to deliver small amount of value as early as possible!

BENEFITS OF SPLITTING

Small stories are:

•  Better understood

•  Get delivered more quickly

•  .. ?

Iteration, RELEASE WHEN READY

Consumable Vertical Slices

DTSTTCPW Do the simplest thing that can

possibly work!

Epic User Stories

T

Acceptance Tests

T

T

T

T

Sometimes creating acceptance tests uncovers new stories

SMALLEST STORY IS A TEST

HOW TO SPLIT

•  What does a user see?

•  What information is essential?

•  What can a user do?

•  What behaviours does the system have?

•  What safety needs to be considered?

•  Failure cases •  What platforms is this supported on?

Business TECHNICAL

Needs Options

Business Development

Value

SHARED RESPONSIBILITY

NURTURING EMPATHY

Through workshops, interviews and gathering research

Mining personas

Comments/Notes

PUT YOURSELF IN THEIR SHOES

CREATE AN EMPATHY MAP FOR ONE PERSONA

Nurture empathy with Visible personas

DIALS There are dials that we can move up and down to iteratively improve the story through iterative delivery.

SAFETY How much do we need to protect the user?

How helpful does system need to be?

SLICK? How pretty does the system need to be?

REALITY How much of the system needs to be there?

PRACTICAL WORK

GROUPWORK

! Get into groups of 2-4 people

! Grab some index cards

!  Select one personas

! Use an empathy map to get into their shoes

! Write user stories relevant to this persona

! What dials can you apply to the stories you write? "  Safety? Helpfulness? Slickness? ..?

Goal: as many stories as possible!

HEADLINE “EPIC” STORIES

! Happy couple: Invite guests to contribute photos

! Guests: Upload photos

! Happy couple: Select photo set to share

! Guests: Add information about photos

! Guests: View photos

CREATE AN EMPATHY MAP FOR ONE PERSONA

THANK YOU!

www.slideshare.net/RachelDavies

LINKS •  Story Maps Jeff Patton 

http://www.agileproductdesign.com/blog/the_new_backlog.html •  Bill Wake http://xp123.com/articles/twenty-ways-to-split-stories/  •  Rachel Davies 

http://agilecoach.typepad.com/agile-coaching/2010/09/ideas-for-slicing-user-stories.html

•  Richard Lawrence http://www.richardlawrence.info/2009/10/28/patterns-for-splitting-user-stories/

•  Lasse Koskela http://radio.javaranch.com/lasse/2008/06/13/1213375107328.html •  James Grenning http://www.renaissancesoftware.net/blog/archives/48 •  George Dinwiddie http://idiacomputing.com/pub/UserStories.pdf •  Joe Rainsberger 

http://www.jbrains.ca/permalink/how-youll-probably-learn-to-split-features •  Thomas http://agile-management.com/wordpress/splitting-user-stories/ •  Mark Levison 

http://agilepainrelief.com/notesfromatooluser/2010/09/story-slicing-how-small-is-enough.html and http://agilepainrelief.com/notesfromatooluser/2010/12/more-notes-on-story-splitting.html