Helping teams to shift from a task-focus to writing user stories requires a different approach than simply introducing user stories as a new tool. You have to adapt the existing practices, by changing how teams think about and discuss the work they do. “Change from…” is different for people than […]
Outside-In User Story Example
Being “outside-in”, “outcome-based”, and “market-driven” is particularly important for creating successful products. The problem is that just saying the words is not enough to help someone shift their thinking. For those of us who are already thinking this way, the phrases become touchstones or short-hand. For folks who are not […]
Agile Documentation
Agile values working software over comprehensive documentation – it is 1/4th of the original manifesto. That doesn’t mean don’t document! It means don’t document more than you need to document. Documentation does have value, but the practice of documenting got excessive – that’s why a reaction to the bad stuff […]
Foundation Series: Inside A Scrum Sprint
People who already use Scrum will only find one new thing in this article – a way to communicate what happens inside a sprint that has proven effective for me. People who are new to Scrum who wonder “how do things work inside a sprint?” will see how things work […]
Agile Non-Functional Requirements
Just because your requirement is not a user story does not mean you have to throw it out when planning your next sprint. See one way (that is working) for managing non-functional requirements with an agile team.
User Stories and Use Cases
User Stories are one of the key agile artifacts for helping implementation teams deliver the most important capabilities first. They differ from use cases in some important ways, but share more commonalities than you might think.
Benefits of Agile Story Decomposition
When you plan a release, agile user stories, or classic use cases are the best sized pieces to use in the planning – from the perspective of your customers. Each user story can be further decomposed into a set of specifications, and those into development tasks. Development tasks are the […]