Audience: agile teams. Learn everything you'll want to know about how to succeed with user stories, and avoid the many commonplace mistake teams make with their application.

Agile software development replaces the traditional requirements gathering process with a more dynamic mechanism: user stories. A user story is just what it sounds like: the customer (representing end users) initiates a conversation with the development team around a specific need for the software. Instead of writing down excessive detail, then tossing it over the wall to the team, the customer promises to relate--primarily orally--the details behind these needs as development actually progresses. The use of user stories meshes well with the short-cycled, iterative development process of agile.

Where's the meat? To take effective advantage of user stories, you must understand their strengths and weaknesses. You must avoid the trap of focusing too much on things like story format and story tracking, and instead understand things like what makes for a good story, and how to translate the vagueness of oral tradition into long-lasting, useful artifacts.

Our one-day workshop on user stories gives you all the material you need to understand how to turn the concept into success for you and your customers. The class is a full, engaging day--chock full of content as well as entertaining and educational hands-on group exercises.

Topics

Introductions
Goals for the Class
Stories: Overview
	What is a user story?
	Card-conversation-confirmation
	Stories and collaboration
	Stories vs. use cases
	Why user stories? (benefits)
	Stories in agile or iterative/incremental development
	Exercise: creating candidate stories
Guidelines for Story Development
	Stories and product vision
	Who’s involved?
	INVEST
	Value and Independence
	Focusing on goals and “closed” stories
	Using the domain language/avoiding implementation details
	Exercise: vetting story quality
Story Derivation Techniques
	Using story format (As a-I want-so that)
	Determining the user
	Roles & personas
	FURPS: considering non-functional stories
Stories and Acceptance Tests
	What is an acceptance test?
	Brief overview of acceptance tests in agile 
	Tools overview: Fitnesse, Cucumber, Concordion
	Agile development flow
	Specification by example
	Stories and artifacts
	Exercise: Using the T of INVEST to vet stories
Story Sizing & Granularity
	Epics & stories
	Agile estimation
	Task breakdown?1
	Exercise: Using the E of INVEST to vet stories
Exercise: Story estimation (simulation)
	Story vs iteration size
	Techniques for splitting stories
	Level of detail
	Exercise: Using the S of INVEST to right-size stories
Stories and planning
	Index cards and card walls
	Software tools
	Card walls
Story prioritization mechanisms
	Planning challenges
	Story dependence, story size
	Exercise: Iteration planning overview
Wrap-up
	Making user stories work