User Stories

Objectives of the session:

• What are the characteristics of a good story
• How to organize stories into a backlog
• How to break stories to tasks and track progress during the iteration

Key points raised during the discussion:

• It is important to clarify the roles on the team - Product owner, Subject Matter Experts, Dev and QA, and what are their responsibilities in writing stories. Product Owner should take the lead in creating stories.
• Story size - break the story until it is too small. Stories should not be more than 40 hours in size.
• What is a story? Written by the business and serves as a starting point for conversation between PO - Dev -QA. Additional details are discovered in iteration planning.
• Good stories follow the INVEST model from Mike Cohn's book on User Stories
• The team need to identify the type of users of the system - User Roles. Stories should be written from the point of view of different User Roles.
• The backlog can include Epics, which are large stories. Those need to be split before they can be scheduled to an iteration