Effective User Stories for Agile Requirements

All projects start out to fulfill a set of requirements but the manner in which those requirements are documented or expressed has a tremendous impact on the project’s success and cost. The technique of ‘user-stories’ originated with agile processes, but is effective for all projects, agile or not.

 

This class provides the knowledge and tools needed to identify and write effective and accurate user stories. Participants will learn the six attributes all user stories must exhibit as well as the five additional guidelines for taking user stories from good to better. The class will also explore the use of user role modelling to write the tricky initial user stories for a project. During this hands-on course, participants put theory into action when identifying user roles and writing user stories for multiple case studies.

 

This course is licensed from Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software. Mike has 15 years of experience with planning techniques on agile projects and is the author of the most popular book on this subject User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development. This course has been delivered to numerous professionals around the world.

 

Duration

1 Day

 

Course Objectives

During this course you will learn:

  • What User Stories are and what they are not
  • The six attributes of a good story and how to achieve them
  • A useful template for writing user stories
  • Practical techniques for gathering user stories
  • How much work to do up-front and how much to do just-in-time

 

Audience

This course is valuable for anyone involved in communicating requirements including (but not limited to) Business Analysts, Product Managers / Owners, Users and Developers.

About the Instructor

Rowan Bunning is an Australian-based Certified Scrum Trainer and is an approved trainer for the ‘Effective User Stories for Agile Requirements’, ‘Agile Estimating and Planning’ and 'Succeeding with Agile' courses licensed from Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software – author of the most popular books on these topics.


 

Course syllabus

 It's a Communication Problem

 

What User Stories are

  • Card, conversation, confirmation
  • Some examples
  • Adding detail
  • Augmenting user stories

 

User Role Modeling

  • Purpose
  • Brainstorming
  • Consolidating
  • Personas
  • Extreme characters

 

Gathering Stories

  • Stories, themes and epics
  • Story-writing workshops
  • Eliciting through questions

 

INVEST in good User Stories

  • Independent
  • Negotiable
  • Valuable
  • Estimatable
  • Sized appropriately
  • Testable
  • Additional guidelines

 

Splitting User Stories

  • Reasons for splitting stories
  • Story splitting strategies

 

Additional Guidelines

  • Tracer bullets
  • Closed stories
  • Non-functionals
  • Single-user stories
  • Contract development specs

 

Case Studies

 

What User Stories are not

  • Use cases
  • IEEE 830 software requirements specs

 

Electronic tools

 

Related courses

  • Agile 101 using Scrum and XP
  • Agile Estimating and Planning
  • Certified ScrumMaster
  • Certified Scrum Product Owner

 

Prerequisites


View printable course description


Course NameDurationPriceDatesCourse Status
Effective User Stories for Agile Requirements1 Day$900Enquire

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