The definition of “Done” (DoD), which means that a feature is ready for delivery, is a concept often discussed in Scrum. In this blog post, George Dinwiddie discusses the concept of “Ready” that apply to user stories that are ready to be developed.
User stories and their format defined by Mike Cohn “As a , I want so that .” are a classical way to record requirements in Scrum project. In his blog post, Alan Klement discusses a new format that he called “Job Stories” with the format “When … , I want to … , so I can … .”
Agile practitioners are aware that Scrum has three roles: developer, ScrumMaster and product owner. In his book “Executable Specifications with Scrum”, Mario Cardinal also discusses how you can use the role notion in Agile to better understand stakeholders that have a different perspective, a concept that is also named “personas”.
Agile approaches have few proposed specific rules or techniques that have become de facto standards. One of these technique is to use the “as a <type of user>, I want to <do something>, so that <reason>” format to define requirements as user stories. In this blog post, Jim Bird discusses the idea that this user stories format is not the best way to manage requirements.
The prioritized product backlog is core to being Agile. A well prioritized backlog allows us to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software at then end of each sprint in Scrum. Lean and Kanban may call it something else, but there too, prioritized work is key.
In Scrum, the standard format of a user story is easy to understand: “As a [role] I want [something] so that I can [benefit].” However, there is more difficulties inside the project team to agree on what constitute the content of a user story. In this blog post, Steve Johnson explores this issue.
User stories are the foundations of the Scrum sprints as they would allow you to work on the right things. Charles Bradley provides a lot of interesting material about crafting good user stories in his Scrum Crazy blog. In a blog post he starts by discussing what a user story is and go right to the point is saying that a user story is NOT a “As a I want so that”. For him, a user story is more than this and should consist of three parts: 1) a written description or short title of the story used as a token for planning and as a reminder to have conversations, 2)conversations about the story that has the details of the story, 3)acceptance tests that that can be used to determine when a story is done.
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