Agile Requirements And User Stories

Thoroughly reviewed and eagerly anticipated by the agile community, User Stories Applied offers a requirements process that saves time, eliminates rework, and leads directly to better software. The best way to build software that meets users' needs is to begin with "user stories": simple, clear, brief descriptions of functionality that will be valuable to real users. In User Stories Applied, Mike Cohn provides you with a front-to-back blueprint for writing these user stories and weaving them into your development lifecycle. You'll learn what makes a great user story, and what makes a bad one. You'll discover practical ways to gather user stories, even when you can't speak with your users. Then, once you've compiled your user stories, Cohn shows how to organize them, prioritize them, and use them for planning, management, and testing. User role modeling: understanding what users have in common, and where they differ Gathering stories: user interviewing, questionnaires, observation, and workshops Working with managers, trainers, salespeople and other "proxies" Writing user stories for acceptance testing Using stories to prioritize, set schedules, and estimate release costs Includes end-of-chapter practice questions and exercises User Stories Applied will be invaluable to every software developer, tester, analyst, and manager working with any agile method: XP, Scrum... or even your own home-grown approach.

This book will help you write better stories, spot and fix common issues, split stories so that they are smaller but still valuable, and deal with difficult stuff like crosscutting concerns, long-term effects and non-functional requirements. Above all, this book will help you achieve the promise of agile and iterative delivery: to ensure that the right stuff gets delivered through productive discussions between delivery team members and business stakeholders. Who is this book for? This is a book for anyone working in an iterative delivery environment, doing planning with user stories. The ideas in this book are useful both to people relatively new to user stories and those who have been working with them for years. People who work in software delivery, regardless of their role, will find plenty of tips for engaging stakeholders better and structuring iterative plans more effectively. Business stakeholders working with software teams will discover how to provide better information to their delivery groups, how to set better priorities and how to outrun the competition by achieving more with less software. What's inside? Unsurprisingly, the book contains exactly fifty ideas. They are grouped into five major parts: - Creating stories: This part deals with capturing information about stories before they get accepted into the delivery pipeline. You'll find ideas about what kind of information to note down on story cards and how to quickly spot potential problems. - Planning with stories: This part contains ideas that will help you manage the big-picture view, set milestones and organise long-term work. - Discussing stories: User stories are all about effective conversations, and this part contains ideas to improve discussions between delivery teams and business stakeholders. You'll find out how to discover hidden assumptions and how to facilitate effective conversations to ensure shared understanding. - Splitting stories: The ideas in this part will help you deal with large and difficult stories, offering several strategies for dividing them into smaller chunks that will help you learn fast and deliver value quickly. - Managing iterative delivery: This part contains ideas that will help you work with user stories in the short and mid term, manage capacity, prioritise and reduce scope to achieve the most with the least software. About the authors: Gojko Adzic is a strategic software delivery consultant who works with ambitious teams to improve the quality of their software products and processes. Gojko's book Specification by Example was awarded the #2 spot on the top 100 agile books for 2012 and won the Jolt Award for the best book of 2012. In 2011, he was voted by peers as the most influential agile testing professional, and his blog won the UK agile award for the best online publication in 2010. David Evans is a consultant, coach and trainer specialising in the field of Agile Quality. David helps organisations with strategic process improvement and coaches teams on effective agile practice. He is regularly in demand as a conference speaker and has had several articles published in international journals.

"Offers a requirements process that saves time, eliminates rework, and leads directly to better software. A great way to build software that meets users' needs is to begin with 'user stories': simple, clear, brief descriptions of functionality that will be valuable to real users. ... [the author] provides you with a front-to-back blueprint for writing these user stories and weaving them into your development lifecycle. You'll learn what makes a great user story, and what makes a bad one. You'll discover practical ways to gather user stories, even when you can't speak with your users. Then, once you've compiled your user stories, [the author] shows how to organize them, prioritize them, and use them for planning, management, and testing"--Back cover.

This is not a text book! It is the participant guide including slides and exercises for those people taking or offering the course, Agile Requirements and User Stories About the course: For many Agile organizations User Stories are the primary requirements management technique. Though simple in theory, practical application is often challenging and requires practice. This course will review best-practices for creating User Stories as well as allowing the participants to create, provide and receive feedback on User Stories. This is an advanced course and assumes that participants already have a working knowledge of Scrum.

This book discusses how requirements are handled in scrum framework. This book starts with discussions on agile software development and scrum framework. Then it moves to a detailed discussion on requirements. This book is helpful for anyone who is associated with agile software development or anyone who wish to learn how requirements are managed in agile software development using Scrum framework. A basic knowledge of software development is helpful. This book, in the first session covers the basics of Agile software development and Scrum framework. This book covers all major aspects of managing requirements in agile software development using Scrum framework. The book starts with product vision, then a detailed discussion on product backlog and user stories. It covers estimation methods used in agile. Then there is a quick discussion on collecting requirements and a discussion with example on user story mapping. It covers with examples, many techniques for breaking down the user stories. It covers a few methods for ordering/prioritizing product backlog items. In the final session discusses different prescribed events and activities in scrum, that processes these requirements.

Introduction Thank you and congratulations on taking this class, "User Stories: How to capture, and manage requirements for Agile Product Management and Business Analysis with Scrum".In this class, you will be given proven methods to create, maintain and manage your requirements using user stories as part of an agile scrum team.I know you will get value from this class as it gives you a full introduction to the concept of agile user stories for managing product requirements. I then walk you step by step through everything involved in managing requirements using user stories including writing, combining and splitting complex user stories. Following this, I give you a complete overview of epics and themes and how they can be used to capture and group complex requirements in any team or business. Along the way, I give you plenty of examples and give you best practices for working with user stories within agile scrum. In this class, you will learn:* What User Stories are and why they are so powerful for capturing requirements in complex projects* Feel confident in writing user stories for any project* Understand what a Requirements Spec is and Why they are less flexible than a Product Backlog built with Agile User Stories* Explain what The Three Rs rule, Acceptance Criteria, the INVEST Principle, the Three Cs principle and Edge Cases are and how they will make you a better user story writer or agile practitioner* Understand how and when to split and amalgamate stories* Learn techniques to help you to split user stories when working in the real world Table of ContentsAgile Product Management: User Stories: How to Capture Requirements for Agile Product Management and Business Analysis with ScrumIntroductionSECTION 1: The World Before User Stories (why do we need user stories anyway)...................................................1The History: Traditional Requirements Documents..........1Intro to Scrum and The Birth of User Stories.....................4What is Agile Scrum? ..........................................................4Scrum Theory.......................................................................6Product Backlog.................................................................16SECTION 2: User Story Principles.....................................22The INVEST Principle........................................................22The Three Cs Formula........................................................25SECTION 3: User Story basics (capturing a requirement) .............................................................................................29How to write a User Story Description (using The Three Rs) ......................................................................................29Who writes user stories? ...................................................29User Stories - The Three Rs..............................................29How to write Acceptance Criteria (capturing the detail and any edge cases) ...................................................................31Acceptance Criteria.............................................................31SECTION 4: Epics and Themes (capturing large or vague requirements) ....................................................................35What is an Epic? ................................................................35What is a Theme? ...............................................................37When to split user stories...................................................39How to split User stories.....................................................41BONUS: Example Backlog.................................................49Final Words........................................................................50Conclusion..........................................................................53Free Scrum Ebook..............................................................54Preview of ''The Scrum Master Mega Pack''........................55Check Out My Other Books............................................60 Scroll Up To The Top Of The Page And Click The Orange "Buy Now" or "Read For Free" Icon On The Right Side!

WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT? Communicate Business Needs in an Agile (e.g. Scrum) or Lean (e.g. Kanban) Environment Problem solvers are in demand in every organization, large and small, from a Mom and Pop shop to the federal government. Increase your confidence and your value to organizations by improving your ability to analyze, extract, express, and discuss business needs in formats supported by Agile, Lean, and DevOps. The single largest challenge facing organizations around the world is how to leverage their Information Technology to gain competitive advantage. This is not about how to program the devices; it is figuring out what the devices should do. The skills needed to identify and define the best IT solutions are invaluable for every role in the organization. These skills can propel you from the mail room to the boardroom by making your organization more effective and more profitable. Whether you: - are tasked with defining business needs for a product or existing software, - need to prove that a digital solution works, - want to expand your User Story and requirements discovery toolkit, or - are interested in becoming a Business Analyst, this book presents invaluable ideas that you can steal. The future looks bright for those who embrace Lean concepts and are prepared to engage with the business community to ensure the success of Agile initiatives. WHAT YOU WILL LEARN Learn Step by Step When and How to Define Lean / Agile Requirements Agile, Lean, DevOps, and Continuous Delivery do not change the need for good business analysis. In this book, you will learn how the new software development philosophies influence the discovery, expression, and analysis of business needs. We will cover User Stories, Features, and Quality Requirements (a.k.a. Non-functional Requirements – NFR). User Story Splitting and Feature Drill-down transform business needs into technology solutions. Acceptance Tests (Scenarios, Scenario Outlines, and Examples) have become a critical part of many Lean development approaches. To support this new testing paradigm, you will also learn how to identify and optimize Scenarios, Scenario Outlines, and Examples in GIVEN-WHEN-THEN format (Gherkin) that are the bases for Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) and Behavior Driven Development (BDD). This book presents concrete approaches that take you from day one of a change initiative to the ongoing acceptance testing in a continuous delivery environment. The authors introduce novel and innovative ideas that augment tried-and-true techniques for: - discovering and capturing what your stakeholders need, - writing and refining the needs as the work progresses, and - developing scenarios to verify that the software does what it should. Approaches that proved their value in conventional settings have been redefined to ferret out and eliminate waste (a pillar of the Lean philosophy). Those approaches are fine-tuned and perfected to support the Lean and Agile movement that defines current software development. In addition, the book is chock-full of examples and exercises that allow you to confirm your understanding of the presented ideas. WHO WILL BENEFIT FROM READING THIS BOOK? How organizations develop and deliver working software has changed significantly in recent years. Because the change was greatest in the developer community, many books and courses justifiably target that group. There is, however, an overlooked group of people essential to the development of software-as-an-asset that have been neglected. Many distinct roles or job titles in the business community perform business needs analysis for digital solutions. They include: - Product Owners - Business Analysts - Requirements Engineers - Test Developers - Business- and Customer-side Team Members - Agile Team Members - Subject Matter Experts (SME) - Project Leaders and Managers - Systems Analysts and Designers - AND “anyone wearing the business analysis hat”, meaning anyone responsible for defining a future IT solution TOM AND ANGELA’S (the authors) STORY Like all good IT stories, theirs started on a project many years ago. Tom was the super techie, Angela the super SME. They fought their way through the 3-year development of a new policy maintenance system for an insurance company. They vehemently disagreed on many aspects, but in the process discovered a fundamental truth about IT projects. The business community (Angela) should decide on the business needs while the technical team’s (Tom)’s job was to make the technology deliver what the business needed. Talk about a revolutionary idea! All that was left was learning how to communicate with each other without bloodshed to make the project a resounding success. Mission accomplished. They decided this epiphany was so important that the world needed to know about it. As a result, they made it their mission (and their passion) to share this ground-breaking concept with the rest of the world. To achieve that lofty goal, they married and began the mission that still defines their life. After over 30 years of living and working together 24x7x365, they are still wildly enthusiastic about helping the victims of technology learn how to ask for and get the IT solutions they need to do their jobs better. More importantly, they are more enthusiastically in love with each other than ever before!

Agile Product Management Just Got Easier Introduction Thank you and congratulations on taking this class, "User Stories: How to capture, and manage requirements for Agile Product Management and Business Analysis with Scrum." In this class, you will be given proven methods to create, maintain and manage your requirements using user stories as part of an agile scrum team. I know you will get value from this class as it gives you a full introduction to the concept of agile user stories for managing product requirements. I then walk you step by step through everything involved in managing requirements using user stories including writing, combining and splitting complex user stories. Following this, I give you a complete overview of epics and themes and how they can be used to capture and group complex requirements in any team or business. Along the way, I give you plenty of examples and give you best practices for working with user stories within agile scrum. In this class, you will learn: - What User Stories are and why they are so powerful for capturing requirements in complex projects - Feel confident in writing user stories for any project - Understand what a Requirements Spec is and Why they are less flexible than a Product Backlog built with Agile User Stories - Explain what The Three Rs rule, Acceptance Criteria, the INVEST Principle, the Three Cs principle and Edge Cases are and how they will make you a better user story writer or agile practitioner - Understand how and when to split and amalgamate stories - Learn techniques to help you to split user stories when working in the real world - Understand the difference between Epics and Themes and when each is used - Learn who is responsible for writing user stories in agile and scrum So let's get started and let me teach you how to improve product backlog management. Introduction Thank you and congratulations on taking this class, "Scrum: A Cleverly Concise and Agile Guide." In this class, you will be given an exceedingly concise guide yet still a wealth of information to allow you to fully understand how to use agile scrum. I know you will get value from thisas it contains the exact methods I have used to deliver projects on time and to a high degree of quality using scrum. I then walk you step by step through the key rules, roles and events used in scrum so that you have an excellent foundation. In this class, you will learn: - Learn what scrum is and why it is so powerful for delivering even the most complex project on time. - Explain the difference between roles, events and artifacts - Understand techniques to deliver your project on time - Explain the difference between Agile and Scrum - Explain what the Waterfall Model is and Why it is less flexible than Agile So let's get started and let me help you to understand and use agile scrum. Scroll Up To The Top Of The Page And Click The Orange "Buy Now" or "Read For Free" Icon On The Right Side!