User story size/scope
When doing agile what are the specific criteria of defining the scope of a user story? What factors should I take into account when defining the scope? Is there any specific formula you use for this purpose? ...
user-stories
Writing user stories for internal technical tasks
I am attempting to manage my projects a little better so I am looking at attempting to apply some of (eventually all) the features of scrum. Looking at user stories specifically the high level format seems to be: As a User I can Feature Description or Artifact is Doing Something How would I write "Upgrade the Database"? Is it sim...
User Stories - Problems that can't be made user stories
I am from an XP background. I know the process very well and have solid working experience with it. I have found it to be the best way to develop software. I find myself in the position of a process doctor of sorts and this creates much self examination and revaluation of my own understandings. A very common thing I hear is that some...
System stories for agile architecture
While trying to apply agile principles to our development process, in particular scrum principles and XP-like user stories, we faced a problem about the architecture. Maybe we are still too much linked to the architecture-centric development, however we are trying to maintain a strong component based development, mixed with the agile mo...
How would I word this feature and user story?
I am learning to create features and user stories and was reading this thread: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1707820/what-is-the-difference-between-a-user-story-and-a-feature-in-agile-terminology But I'm not sure how it helps here. Say I'm writing a tetris game and I want it to be in color. How would I write that? Feature: gam...
Personal tool for authoring & organizing user stories?
My company uses Jira for storing requirements, which are written in the form of User Stories ("As a ... I want ... So that...") with details in the subtasks ("Given ... when ... then..."). I write requirements, usually an iteration ahead of the developers. I tend to draft my requirements in a word processor before putting them in Jira....
Improving user story quality
We use Scrum. We are experiencing problems during sprints when we find the user stories are not sufficiently granular to capture the effort required to complete the sprint. In particular, we find that we are supplied with UI wireframes that contain much more complexity than the original stories would have implied (e.g. functionality dup...
Minor tweaks in story based agile/iterative development
What is the preferred way to treat tiny interface tweaks such as "make the menu colour lighter when you hover over it" when using stories. My first though was to treat it as a bug; stick it on an index card and add it to the bugs file for scheduling into an up-coming iteration. I just wondered if anyone else had any alternatives that t...
Scrum stories and behind the scenes features
As I understand things, the Scrum backlog is composed of a series of Stories that represent something for the end user and this is further decomposed into Features. If this is the case, where does all the behind the scenes features go that aren't really linked to a story but are still useful? For example, say I'm making an application ...
Agile processes for developing programming libraries
Is it possible to or how should one use agile development processes (Scrum/XP) and write user stories in order to develop purely technical programming libraries (think Spring or a game engine for example)? ...
Who coined the "original" User story template
Hi, I'm looking for some background on this template (need a citation for a report). Who was the person who came with the well known template? “As a [user], I want [function], so that [value]” I've been looking for the answer but no one gives a proper citation. ...
Business rules integration to User Stories
Hi, I have a set of User Stories and I have a set of business rules (primarily laws binding my requirements to be compliant). In Agile SDLC I'm not sure where does theses "rules" are attached to my user stories. For example, a user story like: As a doctor I want to add patient information in order to create a new patient file. An...
BDD features of features, should I make a new story or it belongs in a scenario ?
Ok so I'm just starting to try and use BDD for some new development we are doing and I wrote up a story like this for a log viewer feature: Story: User reviews workflow execution logs As a user I want to review the log of rules execution So that I can examine the results and make adjustments/fixes to the rules definitions with some s...
Stories and Scenarios that implies UI
I am trying to learn how to use BDD for our development process and I sometimes end-up writing things that implies a UI design, so for brand new development or new features, the UI does not always exists. For example, if I say this in a scenario "When a column header is clicked" it implies that this feature is based on some sort of tabl...
Mixing Then and When in BDD User Stories/Acceptance Tests
How do you handle user stories/acceptance tests that have long chains like this one, where the Then/When mingle together? Is it best to split this into a separate acceptance test where one tests that the dialog appears and then the second one tests the behavior after the dialog has been shown? Feature: Confirmation before removing prod...
Should we use personas in user stories?
The book User Stories Applied contains single page discussing Personas. The definition of persona from the book is: A persona is imaginary representation of a user role. It futher discuss definition of the persona: Creating personas requires more than just adding a name to a user role. A persona should be described suff...
Implementing User Stories the Agile Way
I'm a newbie to the Agile/TDD world and trying to get my head around some of the basics. This is related to the way I should go about implementing user stories. For e.g. lets assume I have below 2 user stories to start with for a hypothetical content management system: Story 1: As a Content Author I need to be able to create News Arti...
Can you clarify the differences between Conditions of Satisfaction (COS) and Acceptance Criteria?
My understanding so far: (please correct me if I'm wrong) Ideally, COS are specified early by the product owner in the Sprint planning, facilitating a conversation. They can be considered an abstract definition that will form the base of the Acceptance Criteria for the user story or the feature. Acceptance Criteria are developed by th...
Architectural principles as "non-functional" user stories
I am about to start a pilot project in our company to introduce agile practices, including the use of user stories. After reading two books by Mike Cohn, Agile Estimating and Planning in particular and User Stories Applied, I now have a clearer idea of how to proceed. I have confidence in refining our techniques along with practice. Ho...
Utilization of User Stories for automated, scheduled, or reactive functionality
I was wondering what the thinking is in regards to using User Stories to describe automated, scheduled, or reactive functionality. For example, what do you do when you have something like an order fulfillment process which involves pulling an order from a queue, preparing a "fill order form", sending the form to an order processing cente...