Category: How to write user Stories in Agile

Let us discuss about user stories and how to write user stories in Agile

What are Scrum Meetings?

What are Scrum Meetings

What are Scrum Meetings
What are Scrum Meetings

We discussed and observed what is Scrum and Scrum Roles, now we look into some other important terms and terminology. That is what is Sprint and what are Scrum Meetings  and what team discuss in Scrum Meetings.

What is Sprint Zero?

What is Sprint Planning?

We can say Sprint is nothing but Time Frame. Team discusses and decides what the prioritized items are and how much effort required achieving that. For example 3 user stories/ Requirements prioritized items are in product backlog, so team discuss about these three user stories, how much effort required and  how many man days required to complete these prioritized user stories in this sprint.

For example Sprint duration is 2 weeks, and then team needs to complete those 3 user stories within this time frame, which includes, Design > Development > Test > Integrate.

Scrum Meetings:

Daily Scrum Meeting: This happens every day where team will just discuss on 3 questions. Everyone should participate in this meeting, and meeting should be completed in 15 to 30 minutes.

  1. What did you do yesterday?

Here you need to explain what you have done yesterday and what the status of tasks assigned to you is.

  1. What will you do today?

Here you need to explain what you will do today to complete the assigned task as per schedule.

  1. Is there any impediments stopping you?

Here you need to explain if you are facing any issues to complete the assigned task. For example your task is depending on another task or functionality and it is pending with some other team. Then you need to explain the same in meeting, then Scrum Master will take a call and discuss with the concerned team to resolve the issue.  Scrum Master Note down these points and discuss offline with concerned teams.

These questions are depending on your scheduled Daily Scrum Meeting. For example if your meeting is at Morning then above questions will applicable.

If your meeting is scheduled at evening then questions as below.

  1. What did you do today?
  2. What will you do tomorrow?
  3. Is there any impediments stopping you?

Every team member of the team should participate in this meeting and need to update the status. As every individual team member should participate in this meeting, Scrum Master will discuss with individuals and schedule meeting as per convenient time.

For example you are working on Indian standard time as you are in India, but if your development team in some other country, then Scrum Master should coordinate and schedule meeting as per convenient time, and Scrum Master is the responsible person to ensure every team member joins in meeting.

Sprint Review Meeting or Scrum Review Meeting: This will happen at the end of the sprint where team will give demo on completed stories to product owner. As per above example Sprint completed in two weeks, then team will have this meeting and give demo on developed product. Usually it will take 3 to 4 hours.

Sprint retrospective Meeting: This will happen at the end of the sprint where team will answer these 3 questions.

What went well in the sprint?

What did not go well?

What are the required areas of improvements in next sprint?

This is continuous process, team discuss at the end of every sprint to improve the quality.

You may get this question in interviews also what are scrum meetings and what team will do in these meetings.

I hope it helped to provide overview of What are Scrum Meetings.

To know more about what are scrum meetings and what is scrum we can visit scrum official website.

What is JIRA Tool ?

What is JIRA Tool?

What is JIRA

What is JIRA?

Initially I was also thinking what is JIRA and how to use JIRA, JIRA is a project management tool. It can be used to track the requirements status like what is the current status of the requirement assigned to user whether it is open or closed or under processing.

We will discuss in detail what is JIRA and advantages of using JIRA?

Here I am not going to explain how to use JIRA and all, I am trying to provide overview about JIRA tool.

What is JIRA?

JIRAis a tool developed by Australian Company Atlassian. This software is used for bug tracking, issue tracking, and project management. The name “JIRA” is actually inherited from the Japanese word “Gojira” which means “Godzilla”. The basic use of this tool is to track issue and bugs related to our project.

Jira is especially useful for software development because it has built in templates that can be used to help you create a software development project.

For example Jira has a Scrum template that can be customized to fit in with your requirements.

The template can be used to create the development project, once your development project is created, then you can create your backlog, plan your sprints, and your software releases.

A Scrum board would also be created with different columns. The columns show the different status that the cards are in such as backlog, development, Quality Assurance (Q & A), demo and closed which shows the status of the cards.

A kanban board also already available, we can customize as per our requirement. We can use Scrum board or Kanban board as per our requirement.

Has below standard formats.

  • Scrum board tracking.
  • Kanban board tracking
  • Cumulative flow charts.
  • Burn down charts.
  • Sprint reports.

We can create customized boards as per our requirement. It helps us to understand how many tasks we have and what the status of each task is.

Assume we have 5 developers in our team, and we have 50 requirements in our hand, and out of 50 requirements 20 prioritized. So here we need to assign these tasks to our developers.

So here I can customize the boards and fields as per my requirement. If we observe in above example 30 requirements yet to prioritized so I can mark status as “to be process” and 20 requirements I need to assign to my developers. So we can assign 4 tasks to each of the developers and I can give the due dates also as per the requirement.

As per above example 4 I  assigned to X and 4 assigned to Z, so here I can track the requirements x is having how many tasks in his bucket and how much time required to complete the task and actual hours taken to complete the task.

We can track the same for Issues also.

Issue Tracking : Jira can also be used to track issues during software development. It can be used to identify and create new issue tasks, prioritize issues for completion, and track them using a workflow.

You can specify details about the issue which helps with replications and resolution.

Time tracking: Jira can be used to keep track of the the time spent on tasks and issues. This would help with future sprints planning. The time tracking views available include :

  • Working hours per day
  • Working hours per week

WorkFlows

A JIRA workflow is a set of statuses and transitions that an issue goes through during its lifecycle. JIRA workflow encompasses five main stages once the issue is created.

  • Open Issue
  • Resolved Issue
  • InProgress Issue
  • ReOpened Issue
  • Close Issue

How to write user stories effectively in Agile?

How to write User stories

Let us discuss here how to write user stories and what are 3 C’s of User Story.

User Story and how to write user stories.

User Stories and how to write user Stories

When we are working on agile process (methodology), user stories are very important.  Because we have to write requirements as a user story to understand easily.

To write user stories first we need to understand who the user/Actor is and what his role in application is and what actions user will perform by using this product.

  • User story should be understandable
  • And User story should be Testable.

Usually product owner will write the user stories with the help of the team, team will participate on discussions to understand what the requirement is clearly.

A User Story has three primary components. Before writing user story we must understand below.

  • Who is the user?
  • What action he will perform?
  • What outcome or benefit he will get?

Sample BA Document Templates

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This is the standard template using to write user stories.

  • As a <user role> of the product,
  • I can <action>
  • So that <benefit>.

In other words, the written text of the story, the invitation to a conversation, must address the “who”, “what” and “why” of the story.

What are The Three ‘C’s of User Story

  • Card:  The Card, or written text of the User Story is best understood as an invitation to conversation.
  • Conversation. The collaborative conversation facilitated by the Product Owner which involves all stakeholders and the team.
  • Confirmation.

Let us discuss in detail below what are the 3 C’s of User Story

Discussions/ Team meetings:

The collaborative conversation facilitated by the Product Owner / Scrum master which involves all stakeholders and the team.

As much as possible, this is an in-person conversation.

The conversation is where the real value of the story lies, and the written Card should be adjusted to reflect the current shared understanding of this conversation.

This conversation is mostly verbal but most often supported by documentation and ideally automated tests of various sorts

Confirmation

The Product Owner must confirm that the story is complete before it can be considered “done”
The team and the Product Owner check the “done status” of each story in light of the Team’s current definition of “done” .Specific acceptance criteria that is different from the current definition of “done” can be established for individual stories, but the current criteria must be well understood and agreed to by the Team. All associated acceptance tests should be in a passing state.

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INVESTii

The test for determining whether or not a story is well understood and ready for the team to start working on it is the INVEST acronym:

  • Independent — The story should be independent.
  • Negotiable — Can this story be changed or removed without impact to everything else?
  • Valuable — Does this story have value to the end user?
  • Estimable — Can you estimate the size of the story?
  • Small —Is it small enough?
  • Testable — User story should be testable.

User Stories FAQ

What is a user story in Agile?

A user story is a tool used in Agile software development to capture a description of a software feature from an end user perspective. The user story describes the type of user, what they want and why. … A user story can be considered a starting point to a conversation that establishes the real product requirement.

What are 3 C's in user stories?

The Three ‘C’s
This discovery occurs through conversation and collaboration around user stories. In other words, the written text of the story, the invitation to a conversation, must address the “who”, “what” and “why” of the story

What are the characteristics of a user story?

The INVEST acronym, given by Bill Wake, suggests characteristics of good user stories. The acronym stands for Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimative, Small, and Testable. Let us examine each characteristic in detail. User Stories are often inherently dependent on each other

Who writes a user story?

Anyone can write user stories. It’s the product owner’s responsibility to make sure a product backlog of agile user stories exists, but that doesn’t mean that the product owner is the one who writes them. Over the course of a good agile project, you should expect to have user story examples written by each team member.

How do you define a user story?

A user story is a tool used in Agile software development to capture a description of a software feature from an end-user perspective. A user story describes the type of user, what they want and why. A user story helps to create a simplified description of a requirement

Are user stories requirements?

A User Story is a requirement expressed from the perspective of an end-user goal. User Stories may also be referred to as Epics, Themes or features but all follow the same format. A User Story is really just a well-expressed requirement. … It defines the requirement in language that has meaning for that role

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