I got a question at the IIBA chapter meeting in San Antonio: Can your business users write user stories?
In theory, yes. In practice, maybe!
If you have users who want to help, then by all means, let’s take advantage of that. But here are my suggestions to make that a successful process:
- Be ready to train them on how to do it.
- Give them at least 1 good example.
- Work with them on a few. I like the idea of a war room where they are all working on them and you can bounce around to answer questions about how to write them.
- Set the expectation you will review and possibly update them so that they are ready or development. You don’t want to offend them if they think they did good work.
- And be prepared that you may not get anything useful. I hope that’s not the case, but it could happen, so have a backup plan.
Have others had success with this? Did you need to do anything else to make it work? Or any stories of this gone wrong?
