Scenarios and Stories

Managing the Backlog

Common measures
- Hours of effort
- Lines of code
- Pages of documentation (requirements or design)
These deliver not a single bit of value to the user
If the user can't eat it, it's not food.

As a <type of user> I can <do an action> in order to <achieve a user goal>
- As a shopper, I can add items to the cart without logging in, in order to track possible purchase
- As a vendor, I can upload my price list spreadsheet, in order to avoid having to enter data twice.
A story is a unit of real user value
User stories are NOT requirements
- They are just reminders for future discussion
Stories should be Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimatable, Small, and Testable (INVEST)
- Agile Samurai, Chapter 6

The queue of user stories to be done
Most important first
- Importance defined by the needs of the client or user, not the program
Do not attach due dates!
Two common backlogs
- Release backlog: The stories needed for the next complete release
- Iteration backlog: The stories chosen for the current iteration

The release backlog
- has too many stories, or not enough
- has many must-have, top priority stories, or just low priority stories
- priorities keep changing
The iteration backlog
- has unrelated stories
This happens
- because user stories are small, independent,...
- ... so they become numerous, scattered, hard to prioritize

Prioritize scenarios
- which are critical for testing? client demos? marketing?l
Prioritize stories by the scenarios they complete
- Complete each scenario's stories before moving to the next scenario
- Within a scenario backlog, do payoff story first

	Scenarios	User Stories
Purpose	Describe market and product	Define testable units of development work
Actor	Persona, e.g., "Aaron, a CS professor"	Role, e.g., "a teacher"
Story	Complete, from problem to payoff, e.g, "Aaron needs to organize his class into programming teams... GroupR creates 6 teams, balanced by gender, coding skills, and preferred web platform"	One user goal, e.g., "professor can upload skill survey results to avoid extra data entry"

A scenario canvas combines
- a specific scenario
- with the general user stories it needs
Clarifies both the goals and usage context of a user story
Makes it easy to
- prioritize stories by scenarios
- track progress towards scenario completion
A simple example / template

Thanks to Google for the slide template