Storytelling Skills for Agile Teams
, Rachel Davies 
An agile project starts when a customer brings a wish list to a development team to be shaped into a release plan; a guide to what can be delivered and when. Agile teams use story telling to explore user needs and tease apart the requirements into a prioritised list based on business value but also considering technical dependency and risk. This tutorial takes you thru the process of story shaping, from raw requirement to release plan. Along the way we introduce participants to critique and counteracting faulty arguments so they can get to the essence of their stories.
Benefits for participants: Participants will learn about how to use storytelling for agile projects and also more generically applicable conversation skills of handling criticism and defusing false arguments or illogical discussions. We use experiential exercises so participants have fun while learning.
Content outline: This tutorial will cover the following topics: user stories, stakeholder prioritisation, refining stories using critique/argument moves, design stories, estimating based on complexity points, and release planning.
Timeline (30 minutes) Introduction to stories (30 minutes) Exercise 1: Stakeholder prioritization (15 minutes) Exercise 2: Writing iteration stories (15 minutes) Exercise 2b: Writing design stories (10) Introducing planning poker (20 minutes) Exercise3: Estimation and Release Planning (15 minutes) Introduction to faulty arguments and biases (20 minutes) Exercise 4: Arguments/Counteracting them (10 minutes) Discussion of key learning points
We will start with a short presentation on the role of storytelling in agile planning. We next introduce the example of a family looking for a new house – each family member writes user stories on index cards for features in the house. The family then gets together to pick the top five to give the realtor/estate agent. This practices storytelling and stakeholder prioritisation. Now we move into the part that estimating has to play in creating a release plan. We need to dig deeper into each story before we can estimate them in story points, allocating them into buckets. We introduce the techniques in a slide presentation and follow this with group work – the families have now moved in to their new home and now write the stories for house repairs and remodelling. The family has a limited budget and plans to do as many of the tasks themselves at weekends. After writing about the challenges in design stories, they then estimate the stories in points and put together a plan for what can get done in next 3 months. This will lead into group work to practice arguments and counterarguments followed by a debrief. The session ends with discussion of key learning points.