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Showing posts from March, 2012

don't let broken stories wreck your team's velocity

Capturing requirements in Agile stories is finicky business. Stories need to be just the right size and shape, have the right bits of detail, point to a clear outcome. They must capture the who, what, and why in a way that speaks unequivocally to the user and to the team. Badly written user stories will slow down your team in any number of ways. A few recommendations... Get the right people writing the story. Even if you've done lots of requirements gathering, or the functionality seems like a no-brainer, don't assume that you have sufficient information to compose stories without stakeholder participation. In fact if at all possible, the stakeholders should do the writing. You are there to ask questions and help clarify. Without this collaboration, you will end up going into iteration planning with hobgoblins, not real stories. The team then must devote time to figuring out what's actually needed, returning to the stakeholder with lots of questions, rewriting and