Although many might tend to limit the concept of agile requirements to “user stories”, this book by Dean Leffingwell reminds us that there could be more than just a post-it on an information radiator when we talk about Agile requirements. The title of one of the initial chapters is “The Big Picture of Agile Requirements” and this book provides it, together with the small details that can help you write better user stories.
There are three roles in a Scrum team: the ScrumMaster, the developer and the product owner. This last role might be the most important for a team that uses an Agile project management approach in software development. The product owner has the responsibility of building and prioritizing the backlog. If this is not done properly, you will just not build the right product. This article presents the certifications available for product owners in Scrum.
This customer focus listening workshop covers the basics of customer development: interview, building questions and adopting your customers’ language. You will learn: * How to get insight out of 90 seconds, stakeholder, customer or annoying boss * Basics of interview technique (open versus closed questions etc) * Cognitive Biases * Aspirational versus Experience driven Stories (stopping your customers lying to you)
Gojko Adzic is known in the Agile software development world for his work on requirements presented in his book “Specification by Example – How successful teams deliver the right software”. In this small and easy to read book, he focuses on a single tool that could be very useful for Scrum teams: impact mapping.
Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories is another book from Gojko Adzic, a consultant and author that already produced some very good books on Agile requirements like Impact Mapping and Specification by Example. It goal is to help people involved with Agile requirements to improve their discussion with the stakeholders and the planning activities associated with user stories. This is clearly not a book for beginners on how to write user stories.
Before including a user story in a Scrum sprint, it is important to clarify and confirm its acceptance criteria.In recent years, lots of Agile software development teams have been using a simple collaborative technique called Example Mapping to break down user stories. It was conceived co-founder of Cucumber, Matt Wynne, who wrote the seminal post introducing the practice “Introducing Example Mapping“.
User stories can be considered as the most used form to manage requirements in Agile. However, as often with agile concepts Agile that look simple in theory, using them in practice generates many questions: What should user stories contain? When should they be ready to be developed? What is an optimal backlog size? This is the type of issues that Allan Kelly discusses in his interesting Little Book about Requirements and User Stories.
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