My talk at the first SA Scrum Day in Cape Town. http://www.scrum.org.za/scrum-day-1-september-2009 Topic: Better user stories: Ok, so you’ve read all the books and know all about the INVEST principle, and you’ve even got nicely printed cards on which to write your stories, but your team still misunderstands what some stories are about, or estimates them inaccurately. Don’t worry, we’ve all been there. I’ll be presenting a few quite simple tricks I’ve learnt (or stolen) that have made all the difference to our process at 20FourLabs.

2. TELLING STORIES
Scrum stories as collaborative conversations

3. We all know the theory...
• Good Stories should be:
• Independent
• Negotiable
• Valuable
• Estimable
• Testable
• ...but in practice it’s often difficult

4. Product owners as novelists
• Creative
• Passionate
• Perfectionistic
• Constantly on deadline
• Dedicated
• Misunderstood
• Lonely

5. Product owners as bards
• Creative
• Passionate
• Open to change (“riffing”)
• Live in the moment
• Have perspective
• Seek to understand
• Involve their audience

6. That makes good stories...
• Conversations...
• Highly malleable...
• Collaborative...
• Good enough...
• ...not manuscripts
• ...not immutable
• ...not solitary
• ...not perfect

7. That makes good stories...
• A product of
understanding...
• Open
• A song that you
can sing along to...
• ...not the source of
understanding
• ...not self-contained
• ...not a novel that
you get lost in

8. Very pretty – but how do I use it?
• (good) conversations
typically aren’t one
sided
• Ask your users /
customers
• Ask your peers
• Ask your developers

9. Asking your customers
• Resist the urge to jump straight into features
• Try to find out what their problems are
“It takes so long to load a new order”
“I have trouble finding other bloggers”
“My friends want to comment but they don’t
want to have to sign in”

11. Asking your customers (2)
• Ask as many of them as you can
• Enable them to talk to each other
• Ask them questions in return
– “Would having all the form elements on one page
make loading products quicker?”
– “Would enabling search by username help?”
– “Would you like to allow anonymous comments
on your blog?”

12. Asking your peers
• Find out if their customers have similar
problems...
• ...and how (if) they solved them
• Use social media:
– Linked.in
– Forums
– Blogs

13. Asking your developers
• It’s a discussion right from the start
• They may know better (or have better ideas)
• Be prepared to split, combine and scrap at a
moment’s notice
• There’s a difference between vague and open
• INVEST is a test, not a starting point

14. Good stories have...
• Great characters
(user modelling)
• A coherent plot
(product backlog)
• Surprise twists and turns
(inspect and adapt)

15. Horror stories
• “Create Solution”
• “As a user I want the
database optimised”
• “When I publish articles
that I’ve re-edited after
publishing they don’t
get published
immediately”

16. Fairy tales
• “As a user I want an
advanced payment
gateway that processes
payments very fast”
• “As an administrator I
want a mobile console
that immediately alerts
me of any abuse via
SMS and lets me block
the person’s IP”

17. Epic poems
• “As an advanced user I
want a contact
management interface
with three buttons:
Create, Update and
Delete and a list of my
contacts with checkboxes,
names, email addresses
and phone numbers with
a sort option for each
column”

18. Good stories...
• “As a reader I want to be able to browse through a
blog's archive pages”
• “As an Administrator I want the system to send a
registration email to a new user so that their email
can be confirmed by way of activating their account”
• “As an author, I want the spell checker to ignore
words with numbers so that only truly misspelled
words are indicated"
Thanks to: David McLean and Michael James

19. Scrum is...
• ...a certainty engine
• ...about overcoming fear
• ...eating elephants one bite at a time
• ...about the journey
• Your stories aren’t the maps...
• ...they are the conversations along the way