Category: user stories

Switching stories mid sprint

October 24, 2009 by Jack Milunsky

Introduction

I blogged about this some time ago and then posted the blog on various agile forums to judge peoples responses.

Most of the responses were well reasoned, however, one of the responses I received shocked me somewhat and so I feel that it's worth blogging about this particular situation once more.

The response I received was "You're not serious you're going to ignore the PO" and "You can't be a slave to the process"

In all fairness, there are many situations under which the need to switch stories arise. And the specifics were not really provided. For example:

What makes a good story

April 10, 2009 by Jack Milunsky

Introduction
Leading on from last week where I described that their are two main parts to user stories, the user (or persona or role) and the story (a short description of the intended functionality), this weeks blog is intended to focus on specific details on how to write good stories.

The three C's
Most of you are already aware of the 3 C's i believe originally conceived by Ron Jefferies - Card, Conversation and Confirmation.

Card
The card is important in that User Stories are meant to be written on Cards.

User Stories - Tell it like it is

April 3, 2009 by Jack Milunsky

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.