User Story Writing Workshop

This two day course is a hands-on workshop intended to teach students how to create and manage User Stories.  Hands-on exercises are used throughout the course to reinforce the lecture material.
The course begins with a discussion on gathering User Stories.  Various approaches to determining the real requirements for an application are discussed.  The section also includes a discussion on techniques and criteria for evaluating User Stories.

In Agile, a story must be small enough to be completed within a single sprint.  This frequently requires decomposing a feature or a story into smaller stories.  Techniques for doing this are discussed in the second part of the course.

The third part of the course discusses developing acceptance criteria and acceptance tests for each story.  This section concludes with a discussion on User Stories mapping.

The course concludes with a case study, in which students develop stories, decompose them into manageable sizes, and create acceptance criteria and tests for the stories.

This course is intended for those who have a role in determining the requirements for an application.  It is intended for Business Analysts, Product Owners, Product Managers, Project Managers and other project stakeholders

Scrum Fundamentals.  Advanced Product Owner is recommended

Upon completing this course, participants will be able to

• Describe the structure of a User Story
• Define the criteria for creating good Stories
• Develop User Stories
• Define Acceptance Criteria for User Stories
• Use Stories to plan a release

Part 1:  Getting Started

1. Overview
   1. What are User Stories
   2. The Customer Team
   3. The Process
   4. Planning Releases and Iterations
   5. Writing Acceptance Tests
2. Writing and Evaluating User Stories
   1. INVEST criteria
   2. The Developer’s role
   3. The Customer’s role
3. User Role Models and Personas
   1. Roles
   2. The process of Role Modeling
   3. Additional Steps
4. Techniques for gathering stories
   1. Observation
   2. Story writing workshops
   3. Questionnaires
   4. Working with User Proxies
5. Writing good stories / working with proxies
   1. Goal stories
   2. Avoid committing to the UI
   3. Active voice
   4. use Personas in the stories
6. Acceptance Criteria and Acceptance Tests for User Stories
   1. ATDD – write the tests first!
   2. Testing coverage: how many tests are too many?
   3. Framework for integrated tests
7. Guidelines for good stories

Part 2: Planning and Estimating

1. Estimating User Stories
2. Planning a release
3. Planning an iteration
4. Measuring and monitoring velocity
5. Decomposing User Stories

Part III: Frequently Discussed Topics

1. What stories are not
2. Why user stories
3. Story smells
4. Using stories with Scrum
5. Additional Topics

Part IV:  Case Study

1. The User Roles
2. The stories
3. Estimating the stories
4. The Release plan
5. The Acceptance tests