agile on the beach: the art of slicing and dicing user stories
DESCRIPTION
Most agile software development team grapple with user stories as a technique for understanding what needs to be developed iteratively. Come to this workshop to hear some techniques for uncovering useful user stories and how to slice them in a way to deliver value in small increments. We’ll give you a cheatsheet for story splitting to take away with youTRANSCRIPT
THE ART OF SLICING AND DICING USER STORIES
Rachel Davies & Mike Rawling @unrulymedia
You’ll be trying this out! WORKSHOP ALERT
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
STRIKING A BALANCE THE HARD PART
Needs Options
Business Development
Value
SHARED RESPONSIBILITY
Consumable Vertical Slices
BENEFITS OF SPLITTING
Small stories are:
• Better understood
• Get delivered more quickly
• .. ?
HOW DO WE SLICE?
VALUE CONVERSATION
Before investing time in development we need to understand where the value comes from.
Who knows about the business case?
Any differences between user communities?
What are USPs? (the Unique Selling Points)
Are there different user perspectives?
COST CONVERSATIONS
Development is usually the main cost.
We should also consider:
Ongoing operational costs
Check US and EMEA differences
Anyone else outside development impacted by this story? Eg Design, Infra
DTSTTCPW
Do the simplest thing that can possibly work!
Slice the story into end-to-end deliverable chunks that allow us to deliver some value
Sometimes value is learning whether idea is valuable.
HOW TO SPLIT
What does a user see?
What information is essential?
What can a user do?
What behaviours does the system have?
What safety needs to be considered?
Failure cases
What platforms is this supported on?
THINK ABOUT
What types of users are there for this system?
What are the benefits for each type of user?
What might be the challenges for different types of user?
Will user needs change as time passes?
What might be difficult/expensive to implement?
The smallest slice is a test
TESTABLE BEHAVIOUR
DIALS
SAFETY
USER SUPPORT
SLICK
REALITY
PRACTICAL
GROUPWORK
Get into groups of 2-3 people
Grab some index cards
Consider this epic story
Write 1 smaller story per card
Objective: generate as many small story cards out of this single story
Share one small story with the group at the end
Member Video Council Whitelisted
THANK YOU!
Winner Best Content Distribution Service
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
SEE YOU @AGILECAM