Making Sense of User Stories

You'll learn what a user story is, and how it's different from the more formal approach we've traditionally taken. We'll also talk about one of the primary purposes and benefits of a user story - building a common understanding among all team members.

In this section we'll talk about how user stories are like video games. We'll have some fun with this, but there's actually a really good parallel between the two, and the analogy can help explain what user stories are and how they're different.

You'll learn about the benefits that user stories can bring to your team and your projects.

User stories are a little different in that they are more of a collaborative approach than traditional requirements specifications. In this section, you'll gain an understanding of roles and responsibilities in user story creation, prioritization, and use.

Personas help us to understand our users' worlds a little better, and to write stories that more closely meet our users' needs. In this section, we'll explore personas in depth. You'll learn what a persona is and how they can help projects succeed. You'll also learn a 5 step process you can use to identify, analyze, and build personas effectively. We'll go through the first two steps in this lecture, and continue with step 3 in the next lecture. We'll use our example problem domain throughout the whole discussion, so by the end of this piece of the class, we will have defined personas we can use in our example.

In this section, we'll continue going through the 5 step process of finding, analyzing, and building personas.

We'll wrap up our discussion of the persona definition process, going through the final step. At the end of this lecture, we'll have personas we can use in our example project.

Practice identifying and building personas through an exercise based on our example project.

Here's our solution to the previous exercise. There are no right or wrong answers with something like personas, but this will give you one possible solution.

In this section, you'll learn about a model called the 3 C's, which stands for Card, Conversation, and Confirmation. It helps us think about all 3 pieces of a story, and remember that a good user story is much more than the card it is written on. This lecture is an overview of the 3 C's model. In the next few lectures, we'll explore each of the C's in more detail.

This lecture is an in-depth look at the first C of a user story, the Card it is written on. You'll learn what should (and shouldn't) go on the card, and all about the typical format a user story is written in.

Put the concepts from the previous lesson into practice, defining user stories for the personas you created in the last exercise.

Our solution to the user stories exercise

In this lecture, you'll learn about the second (and possibly the most important) of the 3 C's. Conversation is very important with user stories - you'll learn why, and some tips and tricks for making communication as effective as possible.

We'll take an in-depth look at the final C, Confirmation. You may also hear the term "acceptance criteria." These are the specific conditions that must be met in order for the business to accept the story. In this lesson, you'll learn what acceptance criteria are, how to define them, and what should and shouldn't go into the criteria.

Practice defining acceptance criteria by creating some for the user stories from the last exercise.

Our solution to this exercise, defining some acceptance criteria for our user stories.

We'll wrap up this section of the course with a discussion of epics and themes. You'll learn what an epic is and what its characteristics are. You'll also learn what a theme is, and how you can use themes to organize your user stories.

This section of the class is all about quality. As we're building the stories, we want to be sure that they're good, and we can use a model called the INVEST criteria to do that. You'll learn what INVEST is and all about the first 2 criteria (a good story should be Independent and Negotiable).

We'll continue our discussion of INVEST by diving into the details of the third criteria (Valuable).

We'll wrap up our INVEST discussion by getting into the details of the last 3 criteria (Estimable, Small, and Testable).

Practice using the INVEST criteria by looking at some example stories and deciding how (or if) they can be improved.

Our assessment of how the stories can be improved to better meet INVEST.

In this lecture, you'll learn some techniques for breaking large stories and epics down into smaller stories that meet the INVEST criteria.

Learn additional techniques to break down large stories and epics into smaller stories.

Use one of the techniques you just leaned to split a large story into smaller ones.

Our solution to splitting the story.

We'll review all the key concepts of the course, from beginning to end.