A Day in the Life of a User Story

room: Grand Ballroom B — time: Wednesday 09:00-09:45, Wednesday 09:45-10:30, Wednesday 11:00-11:45, Wednesday 11:45-12:30
Level: Introductory

Jean Tabaka passionately believes in highly interactive, collaborative conference experiences for helping people new to Agile embrace its practices. This ½ day tutorial drives a quick-paced set of 8 exercises for attendees working in small groups. From unranked backlog items, to fully tasked out stories, each exercise builds on the work of the previous exercise. Through these series of activities, attendees learn to collaborate and create great user stories that turn into tasks, estimates, and commitments. The tutorial ends with a retrospective of how to apply these practices in real life.

Process/Mechanics

As mentioned in the description, this tutorial is run in small, self-facilitated groups. The tutorial is very exercise-intense with very few slides. Slides are only used as brief introductory material to help each group move into its next exercise.

The exercises that each team runs are:
1. Write product backlog items in the form of a user story by consulting with the designated product owner about the role, action, and benefit.
2. Have the product owner complete a first ranking of the stories.
3. Have the delivery team interview the product owner to learn more about the intended doneness of the story.
4. Write down acceptance criteria based on the interviews.
5. Re-rank the stories based on this new information.
6. Select the top two stories and conduct gross-level estimating using the planning poker approach.
7. Take these same top two stories and now create tasks and estimates for the stories that would ensure they meet their acceptance criteria. Also note risks as you perform this work.
8. Retrospect on how the gross-level estimating and the acceptance criteria information correlated to the final estimates and tasks, and how you can apply this in your Agile adoption.

This tutorial is truly meant for beginners who have never experienced these activities around user stories and yet want to take it back into their Agile adoptions.

Learning outcomes
  • What is a user story
  • What are the attributes of a story
  • How are stories ranked
  • How do we conduct gross level sizing of stories
  • How do we gain acceptance criteria
  • How do we task and estimate the work that defines completion of a story
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