Hands-On User Stories Workshop

"Now we’re running Agile - help! I don’t recognise my job anymore and I’m supposed to work with user stories instead of functional specifications.”


Effective user stories are the cornerstone of successful Agile projects. In this intensive full day course, you will explore what a user story is, learn how to write effective user stories, and experience how to manage your requirements in an agile fashion. The course is an interactive, hands-on workshop that utilises a combination of presentation, discussion, and hands-on exercises to both explain and demonstrate the core aspects of working with user stories.

Duration

1 Day


Course Objectives

After the workshop you will be able to:

  • Explain what makes a good user story and list the six attributes of a good user story
  • Create effective and meaningful stories for agile projects
  • Write acceptance criteria for user stories
  • Be able to deal with non-functional requirements
  • Demonstrate the ability to estimate user stories playing planning poker
  • Explain how to manage user stories in the context of an agile project
  • Move from a project/product vision to epics and user stories.

Audience

  • Anyone who is new to agile or is new to working with user stories
  • Agile scrum masters and business analysts
  • Business owners and product owners.

Course Syllabus

  • Story mapping: How to get from vision and concepts to stories
  • Story writing: How to write effective user stories
  • Story splitting patterns: Patterns for splitting user stories into appropriately sized chunks
  • Acceptance criteria: How to define story boundaries
  • Estimating stories
  • How to deal with non-functional requirements.

Instructor

Sandy Mamoli is one of NZ’s leading agile advocates and practitioners. She is a Certified Scrum Master and became New Zealand’s first certified Certified Scrum Practitioner in October 2007.


With a passion for using Agile to bring true business value to companies Sandy is motivated by helping organisations understand and adopt the fundamentals of Agile. Sandy is currently working as an independent Agile Coach and trainer to a number of well known Wellington-based companies.

Sandy has also worked throughout Europe on large global projects. This has included the Sony Ericsson’s global enterprise website project, which was an agile programme of work distributed across multiple locations (Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Mumbai).


In addition to a Masters degree in Computational Linguistics Sandy also has many years of internet and IT industry experience. This experience has primarily focused on agile coaching, Scrum Mastering, agile business analysis, and data architecture.


Related Courses

Refer to Equinox's full set of Agile, Lean and Scrum training courses.


Prerequisites

Experience in software development projects, business analysis or requirements management would be beneficial.


View printable course description

Course NameDurationPriceDatesCourse Status
Hands-on User Stories Workshop1 Day$750Wellington 14/06/2012Scheduled
Auckland 18/06/2012Scheduled
Wellington 20/09/2012Scheduled
Auckland 24/09/2012Scheduled

All course prices listed by Equinox are in New Zealand dollars and exclude GST.