Co-hosted a story writing workshop at Agile Practitioners Meetup in Oct 2013. The workshop was followed by various real story samples & a scenario was given so participants could write ACs their own. http://www.meetup.com/Agile-Practitioners-Meetup/events/141054832/

1. Story Writing
Bonna Choi and Shane Armstrong
October 23, 2013

2. Welcome!
★ Introduction
★ Goals

3. Story writing
★ Story Writing is not just for Business Analysts and
Product Managers!
○ Each team member can contribute to better stories
★ Stories are an integral part of agile projects
○ Poorly written stories result in functionality that does not
deliver value to the business
○ Good stories result in shared understanding between the
business and the technical team
★ Tonight we will focus on story workshops
○ You will have a chance to discuss stories and identify
■ What components make a good stories for you
■ What would you like to see in stories

4. Story writing
★ Several different ways of writing good stories
○ There is no one best way
○ Teams can differ on what works best for them
★ Story Review / Huddling should include different
perspectives to ensure success!
○ 3 Amigos
■ Business, Developer, QA

5. Common mistakes on stories
★
★
★
★
No business value
No apparent reason why the story is needed
Story is difficult to understand by business and/or team
‘WHAT’ is not clearly identified
○ Lack of clear Acceptance Criteria
★ Focused on the solution
○ ‘HOW’ it should be implemented
★ Difficult to test
○ Story size is too small or too large
★ Non-Negotiable

6. So a good story should be...
★
★
★
★
Business value is present within the story
Reason for the story is identified
Easy to understand by both business and team
Clear definition of ‘Done’
○ Acceptance Criteria is complete and clear
★ ‘WHAT’ is needed is identified
○ ‘HOW’ it needs to get done is up to the development
team
★ Testable
○ Size, scope, clarity of Acceptance Criteria
★ Negotiable

7. Tools for writing good stories
★ I.N.V.E.S.T.
○ Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small,
Testable
○ Advantages: Good guideline on what stories should be
○ Disadvantage: Difficult to apply all to every story
★ Vertical Slicing
○ Slicing thin threads through the system (UI Layer,
Controller, Business Logic, Database, External Interface
○ Advantages: Provides business value
○ Disadvantages: Can be challenging to slice vertically
★ For the purpose of our story review exercise, we wanted
to focus on a smaller subset

8. Questions to ask yourself...
★ Is it understandable?
○ Can the developer understand this story?
○ Can the business understand this story?

9. Questions to ask yourself...
★ Is it testable?
○ Can QA’s test this story?

10. Questions to ask yourself...
★ Is it valuable?
○ Do I know why we need this story?

11. Questions to ask yourself...
★ Is it understandable?
★ Is it testable?
★ Is it valuable?

12. An example story
71.Remove Content from Workflow
Story Description
•As Wanda,
•I want to remove content from workflow,
•so that I can remove content that should not be included
Constraints
Assumptions:
Exclusions:
Dependencies:
Estimate: 2

13. An example story
Details
•Content can be removed from workflow from any detail report
•User can select multiple content items to remove
•Offer a warning with option to cancel
•No constraints
•No Undo
•This is a hard, cascading delete for all step instance data for this content item
Acceptance Criteria
AC 1 – delete content
•Given that user is on the content detail report
•When the user selects a one or more content items and initiates remove, then
•StepInstance and StepInstanceUsers data are removed from the database