User Story Workshop

About This Course

Project failures are often due to poor requirements gathering, analysis and planning. Traditional requirements documents may not contain complete and accurate requirements due to rapidly changing business environments. Agile requirements gathering, by moving detailed requirements closer to implementation, allows for rapid response to change. This "User Story Workshop" will show you how to define and manage these requirements effectively as well as demonstrate alternative ways of documenting requirements and managing changes. These alternatives can allow for a less "heavy" process in projects that can benefit from quick changes in direction.

Course Objectives

• Learn how to adapt quickly and positively to rapidly changing business needs and priorities
• Learn how to collaborate on requirements for a project
• Align development to business needs to provide business value quickly
• Learn the benefits of using Agile methods to communicate requirements
• Understand the five levels of planning in Agile
• Use agile requirements as an effective basis for planning and testing
• Understand the characteristics of a well-written agile requirement
• Understand how to plan frequent releases so that customers can recognize benefit quickly
• Learn mapping techniques for identifying the stories of larger releases
• Minimize risks of ineffective solutions by obtaining frequent feedback

Course Audience

This course is beneficial to all members on an Agile team, but will add the most value for those in a Product Owner role or are a part of the development team and have focus on grooming the product backlog.

This course is perfect for:

• Business Analysts, Requirements Analysts or Business Systems Analysts
• Product Owners, Business customers, users or partners
• QA Professionals, Systems Testers or User Acceptance Testers
• Systems/Application Analysts, Architects, Designers or Developers
• Anyone that wants to enhance their understanding and ability to author and elaborate on user stories

*Delivered by ASPE, ICAgile Member Organization

Course Outline

Agile Overview

• What is Agile
• Why Agile
• Agile versus Waterfall

Business Analyst activities in Agile

• Why a well written story is beneficial
• Analyst activities of Waterfall that translate to Agile
• Differences when aligning to Agile
• How the Analyst role aligns with the Agile Manifesto

User Personas

• Understanding User Personas

Team Exercise: Teams will create User Personas to understand the concept and identify details that make them unique

• Using User Personas inside a story
  • Determining user experience
  • Identifying roles

User Story Overview

• What is a User Story
  • Role, Goal, Benefit
  • Acceptance Criteria best practices
  • Examples

• INVEST overview

Team Exercise: Teams will practice writing stories using the Roles identified from the User Persona exercise. As a group acceptance criteria will be written, simulating a backlog grooming session.

• Other types of backlog items
  • What is a spike?
  • How to use them
  • Example
• Non-functional (tech debt)
  • What is a non-functional requirement?
  • How to use them
  • Example
• Defects
  • Ways to manage defects
  • Example

Team Exercise: Individually the group will write an example of a Spike, Non-Functional requirement and a Defect. Focusing on what makes them unique and how best to document the details for development.

5 Levels of Planning

• Vision
• Roadmap
• Features

Team Exercise:Teams will create a list of features, focusing on the evolution of an application and ways in which to build upon a feature over time.

• Epics

Team Exercise: Teams will create Epics for the features identified in the previous exercise, focusing on how to break down the work into valuable slices.

• Product Backlog
• Prioritization techniques

Hands on User Story Writing Workshop

Team Exercise: The group will critique stories that have been given to them, learning what to look for when grooming stories (size, unclear, dependencies).

Team Exercise: Teams will write stories that relate to the Epics written in the previous exercise. Focusing on the INVEST strategy of story writing and using group feedback to further refine.

Building a Comprehensive Release Plan and Backlog

• Process Mapping
• Story Mapping

Team Exercise: The group will be given a sample process map, they will break the process into stories that remain independent and valuable, even if the value varies.

Prep and Support of Sprints

• Story Writing Sessions
• Backlog Grooming
• Relative Sizing
• Definition of Ready
• Story Preparation Kanban
• Backlog Prioritization
• Release Planning

Real World Workshop

Team Exercise: Individually, the group will get to focus on real world examples, getting feedback from the group intermittently, similar to a series of grooming sessions. Ideally bringing these stories back to their own projects.

Retrospective

• Handling and Adjusting to Team Feedback
• Educating Others