Art of Writing in Agile

Writing User Stories in Agile

Shikha Saxena,

Senior Technical Writer,

Pune, India

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Art of Writing in Agile

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Agenda

▪ History of Agile

▪ Agile and DevOps

▪ Agile Artifacts: Themes, Epics and User Story

▪ Art of writing User Stories

▪ Shu-Ha-Ri Model of Learning

▪ My Story

▪ Conclusion

▪ References

▪ Message.

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What is Agile Methodology

▪ Agile is group of software development methodologies based on iterative and incremental development where requirement and solution evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams.

▪ Agile methods promote disciplined project management process with frequent inspection and adaptation.

▪ A leadership philosophy that encourage teamwork, self-organization and accountability.

▪ It is a set of engineering practices that allow rapid delivery of high quality software.

▪ It is a business approach which aligns development with customer needs and company goals.

▪ Agile development refers to development process aligned to concepts of Agile Manifesto and following Agile principles.

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Agile Methodology

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What is Scrum

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Agile and DevOps

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Agile Artifacts

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Themes

▪ Themes are collection of related user stories

▪ They are used to organize stories into releases

▪ They organize user stories for sub-teams to work

▪ For example, University registration system have themes around:

▪ students,

▪ course management,

▪ financial processing,

▪ Grade administration,

▪ Transcript generation.

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Epics

▪ Epics are the vision of the product

▪ Epics are large user story

▪ Too big to implement in single iteration

▪ Disintegrated into smaller stories

▪ Epics take low priority in product backlog stack

▪ They make their way towards the top by reorganizing into smaller stories.

▪ Model on Just-in-time basis.

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Epics

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User Story

▪ User Stories are primary development artifacts for Scrum & XP

▪ They are high-level requirement containing just enough information as who, what and why require a feature

▪ They contain a written sentence or two

▪ In agile approach it helps discussion around the requirement

▪ Help to carry out conversation about desired functionality

▪ Written on story cards or agile tools online

▪ Written in a specific format.

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User Story in Agile environment

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User Story Roadmap and Planning

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Writing User Stories

▪ User Stories are short, simple, descriptions of a feature told from user perspective who desire a specific functionality

▪ User Stories are written in following format:

As a <user>I want<some goal>, so that<benefit>

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User Story format▪ Formula of 3C to

capture components of a user story was given by Ron Jeffery.

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Rules for Good User Stories

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Writing Great User Stories▪ Identify stories by considering the goals of each user role in using the system.

▪ Split story into smaller ones that cut through all layers of application.

▪ Create constraints cards and tape to wall or write tests to ensure they are not violated.

▪ Write smaller stories that are going to be implemented soon as place holder for conversation.

▪ Write broad stories for functionality further down in the stack.

▪ Keep the user interface out of the story for as long as possible.

▪ Include user role while writing story.

▪ Write stories in active voice

▪ Write stories for single user for clarity.

▪ Have the customer rather than developer help you out in framing the story.

▪ Do not number stories.

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User Story Display Board

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Detailing User Story

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User Story Prioritization

MoSCoW prioritization

▪ Must

▪ Should

▪ Could

▪ Won’t

Prototyping

▪ Creation of prototypes of the system under development at an early stage of the project.

▪ It enables early discovery of shortcoming in the system and allow future users to ‘test drive’ the system.

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User story Estimation

▪ A good story can be estimated.

▪ Exact estimate is not required though.

▪ It should give just enough idea, to help customer to rank and schedule story for implementation.

▪ Being estimable means being negotiable.

▪ It is a function of story size as bigger stories are tough to estimate.

▪ Sometime stories are split into spike to give team enough information to make a decent estimate.

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User story Scheduling

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Scrumban

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Acceptance Criteria

User Story

▪ As an Employee, I want to view an outline for a course I am interested in so that I can learn more about the course and decide if it is right for me.

Acceptance Criteria

▪ User can download the outline for later viewing

▪ User can print the outline directly from the application

▪ User can view mandatory outline sections as course title, location, schedule, instructor, pre-requisites, learning objectives, course goals and so on.

▪ User can view optional sections when applicable, as course number, courseware/books, learning resources, evaluation and so on.

▪ All predetermined font and style guidelines should apply to outline.

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Shu-Ha-Ri Model of Learning ▪ Alistair Cockburn one of the initiators of Agile movement,

in software development, introduced the Japanese martial art concept of learning, in agile, from Beginner to level of Mastery.

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My Story

▪ Traditional Documentation > Time taking, perfect, and complete delivery of product at the end of development with final release.

▪ Iterative documentation > Fast pace documentation for different sprints in each release along side development.

▪ Agile team > As a part of Agile team continuously create user stories, write acceptance criteria in fast changing environment, for development and testing and later documenting user manuals for working product.

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Adding business value

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Conclusion

▪ Technical Writing is a mix of art and technical excellence. Leverage both qualities into documentation style.

▪ Follow Shu-Ha-Ri Model , learn, improvise and gain mastery in the art of writing in Agile.

▪ Focus on creating quality document through collaboration with product team, and march towards one common goal of delivering, faster and better product to customer, which is simple, just-in-time, short and crisp.

▪ Contribute in Agile transformation journey, by learning fast and sharing knowledge gained on the way, till you reach destination!

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References

▪ Cohen, Mike. User Stories Applied (For Agile Software Development, Indian Edition, 2016).

▪ Adzic, Gozco and Evans, David, Fifty Quick Ideas to improve your user stories.

▪ Patton Jeff, User Story Mapping.

▪ Shore, James and Warden, Shane, The Art of Agile Development (Tenth Indian Reprint, February 2017)

▪ Ambler, Scott, and Associates. http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/agileDocumentation.htm

▪ Goncalves, Ester F. “A Roadmap to Agile Documentation”, LinkedIn Blog. (July 15, 2015).

▪ Cockburn, Alistair “Agile Software Development” (2001). http://alistair.cockburn.us/Shu+Ha+Ri

▪ Shu-Ha-Ri: the stages of Learning to Mastery (July 21, 2011).http://www.3coast.com/shuhari-the-stages-of-learning-to-mastery/

▪ Agile Alliance 2015.https://www.agilealliance.org/agile101/the-agile-manifesto/

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Agile is a Journey, not a Destination….