Empowering Product Owners Through the Art of Story Writing
Upholding the value of Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation can be challenging and seem unsustainable in the current day and age. The present day rapidly changing businesses and evolving technologies of the dot com era have created a need for iterative and incremental delivery of value to customers and those who refuse to adapt to these growing winds of change struggle to stay relevant in competitive market conditions.
Developing products by valuing a customer's perspective and regularly interacting with them can ensure a balance of focus between a minimum viable product and customer delight. Attend this session to discover the critical building blocks of good User Stories and walk away with an understanding of the importance of a user's perspective to formulate effective and accurate requirements in order to deliver quality products. This session will also engage the audience with a few interactive quizzes and provide them with mantras for sizing and estimating user stories along with handful examples of horror Stories that have led to disastrous results and recommendations on how to avoid such bad practices.
This topic has been presented on multiple occasions to large audiences (avg. size 100 – 150) at several Fortune 100 organizations including Capital One, Lowe’s, Freddie Mac and Berkshire Hathaway.
Outline/Structure of the Talk
- Introduction (5 min)
- What is a User Story ( 10 min)
- How to write a good User Story ( 10 min)
- How do you know when a User Story is Done / Ready ( 5 min)
- Sizing / Estimating User Stories (15 min)
- Horror Stories that grind my gears ( 5 min)
- Q&A and close out (10 min)
Learning Outcome
- Discover the importance of User Stories through real world examples and analogies.
- Learn about the composition and constructs of effective User Stories.
- Walk away with guardrails/cheat sheet for ‘Definition of Done’ and ‘Definition of Ready’ for a User Story.
- Walk away with a few mantras for relatively sizing and estimating User Stories.
Target Audience
Product Owners, System Analysts, Business Analysts, Project Managers, Scrum Masters, Developers, Testers
Links
I have presented this topic during Certified Scrum Master classes on several ocassions (please see link to video below).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnsvWz6WW8k
Also, this topic has been selected to be presented at the Learning Tree Scrum User Group on 9/21 (Please see link below)
http://members.scrumalliance.org/events/1216
Co-presenter - Vivek Angiras
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