THE ART OF SLICING AND DICING USER STORIES

Rachel Davies & Mike Rawling @unrulymedia

MIKE RAWLING Senior UX Engineer @Unruly Media, London

UX engineering history dates back to 1998… …Consulting, designing, engineering, leading, coaching, training…. Teams and initiatives for Tesco, Wiley, Camelot, Konami, LoveFilm and Granada and ITV

RACHEL DAVIES Agile Coach @Unruly Media, London

Started as software developer in 1988… …Consulting, designing, engineering, leading, coaching, training…. Teams and initiatives for BBC, Egg, Nokia, etc.

ABOUT UNRULY MEDIA Unrulymedia.com

WORKSHOP ALERT

WORKSHOP AIMS

 Understand what a user story is

 Appreciate what a persona is

 Appreciate why a persona is valuable

 Applying iterative approach to story splitting

 Using canned personas not creating them

 Not covering estimation or prioritising 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

Comments/Notes

NURTURING EMPATHY

Workshops, interviews and gathering research

Mining personas

NURTURING EMPATHY

Visible personas in dev workspace Nurture empathy

STRIKING A BALANCE

Needs Options

Business Development

Value

SHARED RESPONSIBILITY

Consumable Vertical Slices

DIALS

SAFETY

USER SUPPORT

SLICK

REALITY

PRACTICAL

EXAMPLE PRODUCT:   Idea: Crowdsource your wedding photos

Invite guests to contribute and view collected photos from event

 Benefits: personal photos – longer timeline including build up to big day – cheaper

 Challenges: privacy, participation, selecting

 Personas: Kim anxious bride, Geoff non-techie guest, Alex always-on-social media mate.

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

PUT YOURSELF IN THEIR SHOES

EMPATHY MAP

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!

Member Video Council Whitelisted

THANK YOU!

Winner Best Content Distribution Service

@rachelcdavies @hedshot

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