Home

Crafting User Stories – Four Experts and The Audience Weigh In

Tue, 2008-02-26 01:57 — Joshua Kerievsky (reviewer)
keywords:
room: Civic North, 2 — time: Wednesday 10:30-12:00
Average Rating: -

User stories play a central role in Agile requirements, planning and implementation. However, experts have different formulas for crafting stories and teaching others how to do it.

In this session, Jennitta Andrea, Gil Broza, Mike Cohn and Ron Jefrries will share their unique, similar or different perspectives on such issues as:

  • Format: Do stories have a typical format or does that just get in the way?
  • Scope: What is / is not a User Story?
  • Size: Does size matter?
  • Splitting: What is it? Is it needed? If so, when?
  • Authors: Who writes or changes User Stories?
  • Details: What amount? What belongs and what doesn’t? How much is in the conversation?
  • Tasks: Their importance or relevance for writing good stories.
  • Estimates: Are estimates necessary for a User Story to be a User Story? Or are they optional?
  • Acceptance: When and how are acceptance criteria defined? Who can accept a story? Are there shades of acceptance (e.g. done and done-done)
  • Evolutionary Design: Does it play a role in crafting great stories?
  • Planning: The role of stories in Planning

We expect plenty of agreements and disagreements among the speakers — all of which should provide for lots of fun and helpful insights.

Joshua Kerievsky will be the session’s moderator. He will actively include the audience, make sure the speakers are well behaved and do his best not to speak his own opinions!

Process/Mechanics

The panel will run roughly like so:

  • Moderator will introduce one of the topics mentioned above or a topic submitted by the audience
  • Each speaker will have 2 minutes to say (and/or show via projector) something about the topic.
  • There will be a general, time-boxed discussion - with moderator encouraging speaker and audience participation.
  • At end of time-boxed period, moderator will poll the audience on whether to continue or move on to the next topic.
  • Repeat

Throughout the session, we will have someone play the role of journalist, who can highlight key points, learnings, differences from each mini-discussion.