User Stories and Beyond - Workshop

Writing the user stories is an art and requires empathy and domain expertise. A well written user story improves clarity and sparks productive conversations. This workshop will equip the audience with techniques to write great user stories for projects like development, services and even automation.

Agenda:- User Stories Introduction (5 mins) Myth Buster (10 mins) Slicing Techniques (10 mins) Splitting Techniques (15 mins) Short Case Study - Application Development (15 mins) Short Case Study - API/Services Development (15 mins) Short Case Study - BOT Development (15 mins) Q & A (5 mins)

User Stories (though originated from XP) are great way to elicit requirements. It’s the written version of customer conversation in standard format in 3Cs (Card, Conversation and Confirmation). A User story as we all know, depending upon the body of work can be classified as Epic, Theme or Feature. User stories are written in a language from an end-user angle so that the development team understand what is needed and why is it needed and foster collaboration between business and development teams. It is indeed no doubt that it requires great deal of expertise to understand customers problem along with domain knowledge.

There are also some myths around user stories like below which I will bust, 1) Only PO should write and be responsible for User stories 2) User stories and Tasks are synonymous 3) User stories can be technical as well as non-technical

It also requires the team to ask powerful and open ended questions to stakeholders (end users) to understand the requirements. For ex. “Will you be able to compromise the page load performance for a nice interactive UI/UX design?” would be a bad question as it allows the user with only yes or no answer. The questions should start with context-free form, open ended and finally specific to understand more details.

There is also a slicing techniques - horizontal and vertical through which user stories can be sliced and both the techniques have its own pros and cons. They are used depending on the context of the project. Splitting the user stories along its path, data, rules and personas is yet another technique to make epics, features and themes smaller for the development team to complete in a Sprint.

Using the above techniques, the audience will be able to learn and write better user stories for all projects including application development, services/api development and BOT development as well.

Technical Requirements: White chart boards, Sticky Notes, Markers, Projector.

Key Takeaways:- 1) Tips to write better user stories 2) User story traps 3) Techniques on Slicing 4) Techniques on Splitting 5) Do’s and Dont’s 6) Learning by doing (15 mins for each types of projects)

I’ve been working in Agile Project using Scrum from 2011 onward and have experience in leading different types of projects including application development, maintenance, services development and lately business process automation (bot development). I’ve seen user stories similar to bare bone structures and the difficulties faced by the development team during development. The productivity of the team greatly improves when the user stories are written without any ambiguities and I’ve seen it improving 20-25%. It’s often thought that BA’s (proxy POs) would translate the requirements and pass it on to the development team without thinking aloud and without possibilities of exploring more details or asking more questions to customers.

There is also a great level of misconception when it comes to writing user stories. Team often gets narrow vision when it comes to writing stories that are technical in nature. For. example writing a story to integrate payment gateway to e-commerce application. Team will often think it is a technical story and does not involve end user, but it is not. (an anti-pattern). An user story can also be written for automation projects (for. ex bot development) be it simple process or complex process. A complex business process can be equated to an EPIC and can be broken down by steps and stories can be written.

I’ve curated many such stories for different types of projects using the techniques I’ve learned and practiced which helped me personally and professionally as well throughout the journey. The audience will be able to appreciate and articulate the importance writing user stories back at their workplaces after this workshop.