User Stories

Is your team a bit confused about user stories? Get answers to common questions about acceptance …

The standard “As a...I...so that…” user story template is a way of expressing product backlog …

Story maps help to create a shared understanding of the product, visualize user needs, and elicit …

What you need to know to conduct a story-writing workshop with your team.

When writing user stories, how should agile teams handle non-functional requirements—desired …

I've been getting more and more emails lately from people confused about the difference between …

At the surface, user stories appear to have much in common with use cases and traditional …

I'd like to clarify the relationship between two important concepts: a team's Definition of Done …

Capturing too much or too little detail in a user story causes problems. Here's how to get it …

As useful as user stories can be, they’ve never been right for every team. An exciting alternative …

Succeeding with agile isn’t just about knowing where to start, it’s about knowing where to go …

Here’s what to do when facing a complex user story that cannot be split but is too large for one …

End your agile team’s struggle with story splitting. Discover this free video training and learn 5 …

There are plenty of mistakes a team can make when splitting user stories. Here are five of the most …

User stories can be deliberately vague at first but detail needs to be added eventually. There are …

What do the testers do at the start of a sprint when there’s nothing to test? That problem is …

Splitting user stories is hard. Here are the only five techniques you need to be able to split …

Splitting stories has long been one of the biggest challenges facing agile teams. Here are some …

A lot of traditionally managed projects begin with a Software Requirements Specification (SRS). …

My wife, daughters and I use Wunderlist to manage our shared grocery list. Any time one of us …

I’ve noticed something disturbing over the past two years. And it’s occurred uniformly with teams …

It is good practice to first write large user stories (commonly known as epics) and then to split …

User stories are great. When you’ve got users, that is. Sometimes, though, the users of a system or …

What’s the difference between a user story and a task? Well that’s an easy question, I thought, the …

In case you haven’t noticed, a few months ago we launched Front Row Agile, a site dedicated to …

In last month’s newsletter I wrote about how we make personal financial decisions in a now vs. …

In 2001, author Ray Bradbury gave a talk at the annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea in San Diego. …

I've been playing a fair amount of Go lately. If you're not familiar with Go, it's a strategy game …

When writing user stories there are, of course, two parts: user and story. The user is embedded …

It's May, and we're well into spring now. If you're like me, you haven't yet done your annual …

Participants in my Certified ScrumMaster courses are often surprised when I recommend that …

I recommend using Planning Poker on product backlog items rather than on the tasks that make up a …

Vision and Backlog

Scrum is a great framework for building a product with the right features. It …

In this session we will shatter the myth that agile teams can't plan. We'll start by looking at the …

Many of you work in a dedicated in-house team, but some of you contract with companies for Scrum …

I was recently interviewed for an upcoming agile textbook written by Sondra Ashmore and Kristin …

I've never been a fan of naming user stories. Stories should generally be short enough that naming …

I've always been envious of those with nice handwriting or even distinctive printing. I've always …

It is sometimes beneficial to write stories for someone other than the user.

A Scrum trainer recently asked for a couple of good, real examples of large user stories (epics) …

Unfortunately, in many companies, we see an inconsistency between project governance and project management.

Does a team have to work with user stories to do Scrum? Of course not.

The vast majority of what has been written about agile processes is intended for programmers and …

You know that before the development team writes their first line of code, they need a funded …

Maybe you work for a vendor who must bid for work in response to an RFP. Or perhaps your company …

The technique of expressing requirements as user stories is one of the most broadly applicable …

The vast majority of what has been written about agile processes is intended for programmers and …

Planning is the act of thinking about the future. Sometimes that future holds risk and uncertainty. …

Removing the large values from a deck of Planning Poker cards is like deciding to strike millions …

The topic of how well a team estimates two point stories relative to one point stories (and so on) …

How do we estimate how many hours it will take to deliver a given product backlog if we have no …

I want to show a real easy way to put user stories in a spreadsheet-based product backlog. I wrote …

Doing performance testing creates some amount of overhead on the team (the tax). This overhead or …

Left unattended, a product backlog can become large and hard to work with. If your backlog has …

When we get features that are too small (as good user stories are), it is very difficult to put a …

The concepts of agility and project governance are not fundamentally opposed. Each is an attempt to …

A DEEP product backlog is detailed appropriately, estimated, emergent and prioritized.

The ideal situation is to put the bugs right onto the product backlog.

We've already overloaded the word backlog with product backlog and sprint backlog. Why confuse …

I'm often asked about the relationship between story points and hours. People who ask are usually …

Most teams do the daily scrum per person, but some encounter the problem described here and discuss …

By producing a single chart that shows both a team's rate of progress and the product backlog, we …

When a team plans a sprint they make a commitment to complete the user stories they select from the …

Sprint planning meetings typically go into deeper detail than is appropriate for product backlog …

I was asked recently how to go about writing user stories for a back-end financial system. This is …

This article addresses the issue of how much detail should be included in product backlog items and …

While I want teams to come to agreement, I don't care how heartfelt the agreement is.

When we estimate it is important that we not mix knowledge-before-the-fact with knowledge-after-the-fact.

A common misperception is that testers cannot do any work during an iteration until the programmers …

In sprint planning the team should always talk of tasks and hours.

User stories are a great way to get people talking about requirements. However, there's a reason …

An academic paper that describes the importance of using more than just the vaguely defined …

An experience report presented at XP2006 covering why it is not as simple as telling product owners …

Products that do everything they're supposed to do and offer consumers something they like, but …

Too much work goes into use cases to not employ them to their full potential. By assigning points …

I was honored to be the guest editor of a special issue of Better Software magazine that was …

Let's face it, most people don't know what they want. Most of us just

This article presents very specific advice on seven things a product owner or customer can do to …

The transition from a plan-driven to an agile process affects not only the development team …

This article describes how a project was successfully downsized from 100 to 12 developers. To make …