Agile#3 – Generating user stories

Where do the user story come from?

User story writing workshop

  • Write as many user stories as you can for the selected theme
  • Invite the product manager, the scrum master, the dev team to make sure that everyone is participating and understanding what we want to build
  • It can last from a few hours to a few days
  • Identify the following:
    • who are the users, understand them
    • what functionality we want to build from them
  • create the backlog with all the stories:
    • detailed appropriately – more details for the stories that will be handled in the next future
    • emergent – it should evolve continuously
    • estimated – predict/plan your releases
    • prioritised – pick the top item to work on

Story mapping

  • What does a story mapping help to:
    • Discover user needs
    • organise and prioritise story backlog
    • understand and communicate user needs
    • plan releases and development
  • How to create
    • understand the problem, what is the benefit to the software
    • outline the activities an user will do in the system (what are the steps for each activity)
    • explore variations – happy path + alternatives the user have, capture the details, look for exceptions, consider other users, involve others
    • release meaningfully – what is the impact of that release, what is the success criteria for that release.