Writing user stories was once a relatively straightforward exercise. Product owners wrote stories in customer-centric language defining why, what, and for whom the story was being implemented. The goal was, and still is, to establish a shared understanding of the requirements with the agile development team without overly specifying how the story should be implemented.
More mature agile teams develop standards and constrain how a story should be implemented with pass-fail acceptance criteria. Criteria bind the implementation around architecture, data, security, devops, performance, scalability, user experience, and other compliance factors.
Mature agile teams grow beyond just in time user story writing
I still here some teams that attempt writing all their stories for an upcoming sprint in the current sprint. Their chief argument is that it gives them the most flexibility to prioritize new stories based on the latest customer feedback and team progress.
That flexibility comes at a high cost.
It implies that a product owner can sufficiently document the user story, explain its rationale, and adjust requirements based on the team’s feedback – all within a sprint.
It means that teams have to understand the story, size them in story points, and draft all the acceptance criteria to align the implementation to standards.
And if the team faces a disruption or team members have unplanned absences, then the backlog’s depth and quality may be compromised.
The need for continuous agile planning
At StarCIO, we educate agile organizations on continuous agile planning. Some aspects of this approach have been documented here on Social, Agile, and Transformation, while additional details are in Chapter 2-3 of my book, Driving Digital. Aspects of StarCIO’s Agile Planning include
- Writing stubs and estimating them before story writing
- Aligning teams on estimating and sizing with story points
- Capturing and managing technical debt
- Being disciplined about capturing meeting notes
- Driving meaningful MVPs
- Following best practices that align agile with architecture
- Enabling QA in agile devops teams
You may also want to review my agile articles at InfoWorld.
Over the next few months, I’ll be sharing a lot more details on StarCIO’s Agile Planning programs including workshops, training, and how to become certified.
Interested now? Sign up for white paper: StarCIO Agile Planning: The Missing Practices to Gain Alignment and Achieve Great Results.
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