Better User Stories
Discover and Deliver What Customers Really Want
The ultimate video course for writing better user stories.
Over 6,000 people use the Better User Stories course to transform their process for discovering and delivering what customers want. Mike Cohn shows you the best way to capture requirements, as well as how to write, split, and add detail to stories so you can consistently ship value and delight stakeholders.
What You Get
Instant access to all 9 modules
60+ professionally recorded videos (English captions available), over 6 hours of content
Workbooks, quizzes, and lesson transcripts and MP3 files
Why Take Better User Stories
If you don’t have a system for working with stories your backlog can feel chaotic. Stories become inconsistent and hard to split; teams spend more time arguing in planning meetings instead of delivering value. But with the right process you can write user stories easily and work with your team to deliver them on time.
Better User Stories provides a solid foundation about how to make user stories work in the real world. This is the only course about user stories that is designed by author of the popular User Stories Applied book, Mike Cohn.
If you want to master user stories and coach others to do the same, this course is for you.
With this course you can:
- Understand user stories and feel confident coaching others
- Identify key personas and identify their needs
- Run successful story-writing workshops and create consistent stories
- Use story maps to reveal hidden requirements and inter-dependencies
- Stop wasting time in planning meetings
- Split any story so you can complete it in an iteration and deliver value
What Stories Are
- Introduction
- Some Sample User Stories
- Card, Conversation, Confirmation
- Is a Template for Use Really Necessary Really Necessary
- Detail Is Deliberately Deferred
- Stories Are Pointers to Requirements
- How Stories Differ from ‘System Shall’ Statements
- How Stories Differ from Use Cases
Users, User Roles and Personas
- Introduction to User Roles and Personas
- User Rules – Context, Characteristics, and Criteria
- How to Do User Role Model
- Creating Personas for High-Consideration Products
- Attributes to Consider When Creating a Persona
- Documenting a Persona
- Systems and Developers as Users
- Decorated User Rolls
- Writing User Stories for the Right User
Story Mapping and Story-Writing Workshops
- Introduction to Story-Writing Workshops and Story Mapping
- The Four Times to Write Stories
- The Significant Objective Focuses the Scope of a Story-Writing Workshop
- Story-Writing Workshop, Attendees, Duration, and Preparation
- The Story-Writing Workshop Agenda
- Story Mapping
- Going Deeper with Story Mapping
- Making Decisions with a Story Map
- Organizing Stories with a Goal Story Hierarchy or a Mind Map
Adding Detail with Conditions of Satisfaction or Acceptance Criteria
- Introduction to Adding Detail
- Progressive Refinement – Adding Detail Over Time
- Epics and Themes – Some Clear, Useful Definitions and Examples.
- Two Ways of Adding Detail to a Story
- Why I Prefer Conditions of Satisfaction Rather than Acceptance Criteria
- How Much Detail Is Appropriate
- Working with the Team That Wants Too Much Detail
- Definition of Ready and Why Having One Could Be Dangerous
INVEST in Good Stories
- Introduction to INVESTing in Good Stories
- Independent
- Negotiable
- Luggable
- Estimated
- Small or Sized Appropriately
- Testable
Splitting Stories
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- The Introduction to Complex and Compound Stories
- The SPIDR Approach to Splitting Stories
- S – Splitting Stories with Spikes
- P – Splitting Stories Along Paths
- I – Splitting Stories by Interfaces
- D – Splitting Stories by Data
- R – Splitting Stories by Rules
- Tracer Bullets
- Closed Stories
- Three Things to Do When You Can't Split a Story
Overcoming Common Problems
- Introduction to Overcoming Common Problems
- Managing Dependencies Between Stories
- Stories with Too Much Detail
- Spending Too Much Time Splitting Stories
- Stories Involving More than One Team
- Stories That Are Really Tasks
- Managing the Need for a Requirement Document
Things That Are Not User Stories
- Introduction to Not Everything Needs to Be a User Story
- Nonfunctional Require Requirements
- Stories and Bugs
- Features from Future–Driven Development
- Job Stories
- Looking Further at Job Stories
Wrap Up
- Remembering the Purpose of User Stories
The ‘definitive authority’ is the phrase that comes to mind when I think about Mike Cohn and User Stories. As an agile trainer, I frequently refer my clients to Mike’s Better User Stories course as a cost-effective, high-value way to significantly improve their personnel’s user story writing skills. Take this course and learn from the best!
Ken RubinAgile trainer, coach, and author of the #1 bestseller: Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process
I think learning from someone who wrote the book on the topic is priceless... Great course. I will definitely be referencing it over and over again.
Aaron Corcoran
As a lifelong learner, and someone who has to reach many diverse audiences, it is important that I constantly add 'new arrows to my quiver'. The tidbits and anecdotes are great 'mental thumbtacks' for recalling important elements on the path to success writing, using and managing work using User Stories.
Travis Reed
Mike is an amazing story teller with the unique ability of making esoteric topics such as user stories magically come to life.
Eugene Nikomba
Access Our Resources, Planning Poker® and AI Toolkit
Expanded access to MGS Essentials, included with your trainining, is your toolkit for doing agile better, with resources that help you and your team move faster, plan smarter, and deliver more value.
Access live events, video lectures, and a powerful set of tools including online Planning Poker®, the Elements of Agile assessment and AI tools for coaching, story splitting and backlog item generation.
Upcoming Public Training
Course Includes:
Certification Credits
Your Instructor
Mountain Goat has handpicked instructors that share our training values. These are people with deep experience, who are leading teams with agile today and can give you real-world answers about what does and doesn’t work.
Mike Cohn
With 20+ years of agile training experience, Mike has honed a talent for explaining agile concepts with clear illustrations and real-life examples. Participants enjoy his passion for teaching the agile methodologies in a relatable and digestible way.
Read more...Mike is CEO of Mountain Goat Software, and one of the industry’s most well-respected Certified Scrum Trainers. He is the author of User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development, Agile Estimating and Planning, and Succeeding with Agile. He is a co-founder and former board member of the Scrum Alliance, and a co-founder of the non-profit Agile Alliance, home of the Agile Manifesto.
Scrum Certifications include: CSM, CST, CSPO, A-CSM, CSP-SM, CSP-PO
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