Category: requirements
Introduction
At every training session I do on Agile and Scrum, there two questions that are guaranteed to be asked without fail. What are user stories? and Why are they called user stories?
Most participants understand that they're some form of user requirement but 99 times out of 100 they confuse user stories with use cases. Requirements are probably the most important aspect of software development. If you get the software requirements wrong, then no matter how good your software development team is, the project is doomed to failure.
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Some time ago I was talking to engineers responsible for some part of the software and I was asking when they will be ready for production. In other words I asked them when their features will be ready. They told me that they are ready now. What was my surprise when I tried to test their software and discovered that about 50% of cases were not working at all. So I asked them why they told me that they are "done" when they haven't even implemented half of the planned features? They answered me: "We know it doesn't work but it's done - we implemented something so it's done. Now we have to work on quality i.e. implement rest of the features."
When I heard this I think I might have looked like the lady from the picture. I couldn't believe someone can think like this - if we implement one use case out of one hundred we can consider the project done? The rest is the "quality"? I don't think so.
In this post I'll try to explain once again what is definition of done and why it's so important to have the same definition at least among all the people involved in the development of a single project.
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And now, a story about physics. I'll get to programming in a second though, I promise. In 1900 Lord Kelvin (of the Kelvin temperature scale among many other things) spoke at the meeting of Royal Institute in London. There was a consensus at the time that physicists had succeeded in discovering almost everything knowable about the universe. Kelvin was one of the believers in this idea and also one of the most powerful and influential men in science. His speech at the Institute was on 2 'dark clouds' he saw on the horizon, 2 experimental results that didn't fit in with what they knew at the time. Since they thought they knew almost everything, Kelvin was confident that these clouds would be found out and moved past sooner rather than later. What he couldn't have known was that within the next decade, those 2 dark clouds would revolutionize not only physics but would literally lead to the invention of our modern world, including the computer you're reading this article on.
Read on for how this story relates to Agile projects. Although if you've been on a sufficiently large project, you can probably see the connection between things on the horizon that seem small and end up having a huge influence on your project. In this part of My First Agile Project I'll talk about a part of our project that seemed like a 'dark cloud' and ended up being a tornado tearing through our town.
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"As a Product Owner and the development team we want to have user stories of the appropriate size so that we could plan realistically while not wasting time on estimating and managing what would anyway will be changed" - A possible user story.
User stories are the the most used format for agile requirements. The main point of the user stories is to focus on the concrete user needs and not on figuring out the extensive amount details that are known to be difficult to gather upfront. A usual recommendation for stories to make more sense is to follow the INVEST acronym popularized by Mike Cohn in his books on user stories
and on estimating and planning
. According to these books and various online recommendations a good user story should be:
- Independent
- Negotiable
- Valuable
- Estimatable
- Small
- Testable
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In the first part of this series about my team's first Agile project, you read about some of the mistakes we made in only doing 80% of Scrum. In this part, I'll talk about the initial Inception Phase of the project and about our Sprint Planning meetings. As usual, we did some things right and did some things we hopefully won't do again. I'd love to hear in the comments how our experience compares to yours.
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User Stories are a not mandatory, but very recommended part of Scrum and eXtreme Programming methods. Most of people acquainted with agile software development feel comfortable with the requirements written in the form of "As a [user role] I want to [goal], so that [reason]". Less people are acquainted with epics and themes usage.
Terms
Epics are just huge stories for capturing relatively low priority requirements that are often too complex to estimate right away and that are going to be detailed later. An epic for a car could be "As an environment conscious driver I want to be able to use both gas and hydrogene". A theme on the other hand is a set of stories grouped around some functional area, user group or anything else that makes sense for the product owner. Themes are often confused with epics, because quite often the epic is split down into exactly one theme. A theme for a car could be a set of stories grouped around the building the hydrogen engine.
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Definition of done is one of the central concepts of Scrum process. Every iteration the team is supposed to release an increment of software that is fully done. Ideal Scrum team every iteration delivers software right to the customer hands, manages to arrange the trainings, print documentation and so on. Most of the real world teams, however, aim at somewhat smaller goals. What exactly is expected to be delivered by the iteration end depends on the team's definition of done.
Evolution of Done
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What is a User Story?
A user story describes desired functionality from the customer(user) perspective. A good user story describes the desired functionality, who wants it, and how and why the functionality will be used. The basic components of a User Story are sometimes dubbed as the three C's:
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Update: See also section added
Product backlog in Scrum is simply a list of things needed to be done. As such it is a little different from many other to-do lists. The difference comes from the small peculiarities of the way you handle the backlog. Here some some things to note about the product backlog.
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Agile teams try to avoid the over-detalization of the customer requirements. In many cases the initial requirements are specified as loosely as in one sentence. In order to keep focus on the real customer demand (and not on what dialogs he'd like to see) the feature requests are often expressed in a form of "As a , I want [so that ]". For example, "As a network administrator, I want to monitor the most active nodes of the system so that I was able to easily balance the load". This form of requirement works very well until you start to work on it.
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