Agile User Stories

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Values of Agile

Respect Openness

Trust Courage
Foundation
Values

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Agile Principles

1. Begin with clarity about the outcome, and let it guide

every step along the way.

2. Listen, iterate, learn and course correct rather than wait

until it's perfect.

3. Encourage self-direction for teams to unleash innovation,

instead of concentrating leadership in the hands of a select
few.

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Discovery

1. Begin with clarity about the outcome, and let it guide

every step along the way.

Explore/
Mobilize Understand
Strategize

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Book
• User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story,
Build the Right Product
• Jeff Patton

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Why User Stories?
• To get shared understanding
• Shared documents are NOT shared understanding
• To avoid the traps of “Requirements documents”
(details to follow…)

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Reaching Shared Understanding

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Reaching Shared Understanding

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Reaching Shared Understanding

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Reaching Shared Understanding

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The Three Cs

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What is a User Story?
• A placeholder for a conversation to reach shared
understanding
• Minimize output. Maximize outcome and impact
• User Stories are NOT the same as requirements.

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Building by components

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Building Incrementally

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Why small batch User Stories?
• Evolving incremental value
• Increases flexibility
• Faster feedback
• Continuous delivery
• Reduced risk

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What’s so bad about Reqs Docs?
• Things are not knowable in advance
• Delays customer value
• Time consuming to write and read
• Learning in discovery is a bad change of scope
• Not amenable to iterative, incremental delivery

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INVEST in good User Stories
• I – Independent
• N – Negotiable
• V – Valuable
• E – Estimable
• S – Small
• T – Testable

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Good examples
• As a bank customer, I can change my PIN so that it
is more secure
• As a student, I can find my grades online so that I
don’t have to wait until the next day to know
whether I passed.
• As a book shopper, I can read reviews of a selected
book to help me decide whether to buy it.
• As an author, I want the spell checker to ignore
words with numbers so that only truly misspelled
words are indicated.

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Not so good examples
• Design brochure layout
• Write game rules
• As Product Owner, I want a list of highly-rated
restaurants on the brochure.

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What’s an epic?
• Just a big User Story (not Small)
• Bigger than one iteration (not Small)
• Not narrow enough to be easily Estimable

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Epic like baking a complex cake

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Break down the cake Epic

Upper Iowa University

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Gains from Agile
• Faster release of customer value
• Long term
• First, the main benefits are
• Quick and regular release of high impact
functionality

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Ideas for slicing User Stories
• As a user – narrow the “user”
• I want to – narrow what the “user” can do
• So that I – narrow the business outcome

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