9 User Story Smells and Anti-patterns

1. Thinking that everything is a user story Many mistakenly believe that if you are Agile or using Scrum, then you must use user stories and no other format is acceptable. User stories are not required in Scrum. Product Backlog Items can take any format. User stories are a recommended technique due to some benefits over…

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What’s the Most Important Part of a User Story?

Looking at the user story template, which part of the user story is the most important part? Is it the Who, What, Why, How, or Acceptance Criteria? Let’s first look at the How – It’s important to note that the user story does not contain details about the How. Generally, the how are technical tasks that…

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Top 5 Techniques for Splitting a User Story

When splitting user stories, we should always split them vertically as if we are slicing a piece of cake. The whole cake is a cake and each vertical slice is a piece of cake with all it’s layers. A horizontal slice might just have the icing, or maybe just the filling, or just the crust and…

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What’s the Right Size for a User Story

Product Backlog Items (PBIs) or user stories should be small. Small stories provide focus for the team and gives members the flexibility to adjust and adapt to changes. The larger the story, the higher the risk of team members getting lost in the details and creating bottlenecks as members are busy and unavailable to collaborate and…

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Top 3 Reasons to Split a User Story

Here are the top 3 reasons to split a user story: Size – Large user stories need further refinement to break them down into more manageable pieces. Key indicators that a user story is too large are if the estimate is greater than the Sprint duration, or if the estimate is greater than the remaining time…

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The 6 Attributes of Effective User Stories – INVEST

Bill Wake came up with the INVEST acronym to help us remember guidelines for writing effective user stories: Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimatable, Small, and Testable. Independent: As much as possible, try to make sure that stories are not interdependent as this might lead to prioritization and planning problems. Independent is different from logical order of developing…

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Top 5 Advantages of User Stories

Before we look at why use user stories, let’s first start by looking at other common requirement gathering techniques. 1st, there is the IEEE 830 with “The system shall… “, The system shall do this…, the system shall do that, and my favorite, the system shall be bug free 😊. We typically start out with an…

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What is a User Story?

A user story is one way of representing requirements in a Product Backlog. Mike Cohn defines a user story as a simple, clear and short description of customer valued functionality. It is composed of 3 parts: a written description used for planning, conversation to flesh out the details, and tests to determine completeness. Similarly, Ron Jefferies…

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10 Essentials for Success in Digital Service Delivery

This post summarizes the Digital Service Delivery blog series by focusing on 10 essentials for successfully using Lean Discovery practices, Agile Delivery techniques and a DevOps mindset to build solutions our customers love. Lean Discovery practices help us ensure that the solutions we are building are not only viable from a business perspective and feasible from…

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A DevOps Mindset

To truly succeed in Lean Discovery and Agile Delivery practices and techniques, an organization must adopt an Agile and DevOps mindset. This is more than technical practices to automate our deployments. This requires a culture change aligned with Agile values and principles. This culture change is about focusing on continuously delivering high value working features on a…

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Agile Delivery Practices

In the Lean Discovery blog we saw how these practices help us narrow our focus on an MVP and ensure we are building the right thing. Agile Delivery practices help us build the thing right. Moreover, nothing beats true validated learning than having a feature released to a subset of our user base and measuring specific…

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Lean Discovery Practices

Lean Discovery Practices help us validate our MVP to ensure we are building the right thing. Eric Ries, author of Lean Startup, reminds us that “The big question of our time is not can it be built, but should it be built?”Eric Ries To know that, we have to go through quick build, measure, and learn…

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MVP vs. MMF

The Agile value proposition is about early delivery of business value, reduced risk, increased visibility and increased adaptability. These are achieved by continuously delivering customer valued functionality by building MVP (minimal viable products) and MMF (minimal marketable features). The terms MVP or MMF are often used interchangeably, but are they really the same thing and if…

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