Extended Education

Effective User Stories for Agile Requirements in Silicon Valley, CA

Course Description

Projects start with their requirements. How those requirements are documented or expressed has a tremendous influence on the rest of the project. A great way to build software that meets real users’ real needs and gets the project off on the right foot is to begin with user stories.

User stories are simple, clear, brief descriptions of functionality told from the perspective of a user. User stories in agile and Scrum development can be useful to either a user of the software or the customer of the software. These user stories can then become the product backlog of an agile or Scrum project.

The technique of expressing requirements as user stories is one of the most broadly applicable techniques introduced by the agile processes; and user stories can also be an effective approach on all time-constrained projects.

This course provides you with the knowledge and tools needed to identify and write effective and helpful user stories. You’ll learn the six attributes all good stories must exhibit and thirteen guidelines for writing a better user story. The class explores how user role modeling can help when gathering a project's initial stories. During this hands-on course, all participants will have the opportunity to practice identifying user roles and writing stories on a case study.

PMPs: This course counts for 7.5 Professional Development Units (PDUs).

This course will be held at the Domain Hotel and will run from 8:30am - 4:30pm.

You Will Learn

• A useful template for writing user stories
• The six attributes of a good story and how to achieve them
• How to write non-functional requirements as user stories
• How much work to do up-front and how much to do just-in-time
• How to conduct a story-writing workshop
• Practical examples from real-world projects

What You Get

• High quality training from an industry expert
• A continental breakfast buffet, a hot lunch buffet, an afternoon snack, and continuously replenished drinks
• A 4 GB USB drive containing a PDF of the course materials, relevant articles by Mike Cohn and others, sample chapters from Mike's books, and other information
• A printed, color copy of the course materials

Guarantee

We are so confident that you will benefit from our training that we offer a 100% money back guarantee. If you aren’t satisfied with the training you received, contact us within thirty days to receive a full refund of the registration fee, no questions asked.

Refund Policy

A full refund will be provided if you cancel or transfer your registration to a different event no later than five business days prior to the start of the class. If you cancel or transfer within five business days you will be charged $150 per class.

Professional Development Units (PDUs)

PMPs: You can receive 7.5 PDUs for this course. 

• It's a communication problem
• What user stories are
  • Card, conversation, confirmation
  • Some examples
  • Adding detail
  • The product backlog iceberg
  • Augmenting user stories
• Users and user stories
  • Proxy bias
  • User roles
  • User role modeling
  • Personas
  • Extreme characters
• Gathering stories
  • Questionnaires
  • Observation
  • User interviews
  • Story-writing workshops
• INVEST in good stories
  • Independent
  • Negotiable
  • Valuable
  • estimatable
  • Sized Appropriately
  • Testable
  • Additional guidelines
• A tools interlude
• Created case studies
  • Creating and selecting case studies
  • Writing the product backlogs
  • Lessons Learned
• What user stories are not
  • Use cases
  • IEEE 830 Software Requirements Specs
• Why user stories
• Why not user stories

This course is equally suited for programmers, testers, managers, analysts and even customers and product owners who are interested in applying these agile techniques to their projects.