Lately, I’ve been working on an Agile project where all the requirements are written in the user story and acceptance criteria format. The acceptance criteria on this project are really the meat and potatoes of the requirements. They tell the developers what to develop and how the system should act in given circumstances. So it […]
Tag: user stories
Agile User Stories – A Promise for a Conversation
One thing I like most about being a Product Owner is that I get to engage with many different types of people on a day-to-day basis. As a Product Owner who is part of a Scrum team, I especially enjoy building relationships with the rest of my team members. As we all get to know […]
Sprint Carry-Over: An Agile Team’s Dirty Little Secret
What does “Done” mean, really? Working on an Agile project is really an exercise in honesty and self-reflection; if your team can’t predictably complete its work, can’t progress through each of its sprints; it’s safe to assume each of your team’s releases will be equally unpredictable. And here lies the crux of an Agile team’s […]
Interlocks in Agile
One of the questions we often get from companies/projects trying to move to Agile methodology is how does an Agile team deal with interlocks, especially when those interlocks are on the Waterfall methodology and want their requirements and commitment a year to a year and a half in advance? To be clear and upfront, I […]
A (Failed) Humorous Attempt: How to Write the Imperfect User Story
As a User Story, I should not have an actor for my user story. I’m not too certain if a user story is still a user story if the story…lacks a user. As a User Story, I must use systems as my actor. Hey! Systems can be actors too! The only issue is…how do you […]
Challenges with User Stories
A Promise to have a Conversation I’ve been writing user stories for a couple of years now, and the best way I’ve heard how to describe them is that they are a promise to have a conversation. Enough information should be written down to give the reader an idea of what the gist of the […]
Top 10 User Acceptance Testing Preparation Tips
If you are a Product Manager or Business Analyst in charge of managing users through User Acceptance Testing (UAT), here are the top 10 things to do to prepare: Formal scripts – prepare formal scripts for the business users to run. If you can re-use any of QA’s scripts, all the better. At a minimum, […]
4 Tips for Business Users Helping to Write User Stories
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 […]