InfoQ Homepage User Stories Content on InfoQ

Articles

RSS Feed

Newer Older

Culture & Methods

User Story: a Placeholder for a Conversation

User stories are meant to be a placeholder for a conversation. This article dives into the differences between user stories and tickets, where stories came from and how recent trends are moving us away from conversations. It shows the impact this is having on product development and easy ways to improve collaboration through conversation and writing better stories.

Kimberly Hendrick
on Sep 28, 2023
Web Development

Functional UI - a Model-Based Approach

Functional UI techniques rely on the functional relation between events processed by the user interface and the actions performed by the interface. If the user interface has discrete modes in which its behavior can be expressed simply, a modelization with state machines is an advantageous functional UI technique. This article explains the technique, its benefits and how it is used in the industry.

Bruno Couriol
on Feb 22, 2020
Culture & Methods

Scaling Agile - Slice and Understand Together

This second article in the series about making scaled agile work digs into how to slice requirements. If this is done right, it will not only result in good slices, but also a common understanding of the product we’re about to build or enhance.

Ole Jepsen
on Oct 29, 2017
Culture & Methods

User Stories Are Placeholders for Requirements

It can be difficult to change from a Waterfall approach where ‘business analysts write big requirements up front’ to the Agile practice in which requirements are prepared ‘just in time’, and are the responsibility of the entire team. The secret to success in Agile is ruthless management of scope.

Russ Lewis
on Jun 06, 2016
Culture & Methods

Q&A with the Authors on "Requirements: The Masterclass LiveLessons-Traditional, Agile, Outsourcing"

Suzanne and James Robertson, authors of numerous publications in the requirements field, launched a video course called "Requirements: The Masterclass LiveLessons-Traditional, Agile, Outsourcing". InfoQ interviewed them on these video lessons to get further insights into some of the topics addressed.

Rui Miguel Ferreira
on Apr 17, 2016
Probabilistic Project Planning Using Little’s Law

When working on projects, it is most of the time necessary to forecast the project delivery time up front. Little’s Law can help any team that uses user stories for planning and tracking project execution no matter what development process it uses. We use a project buffer to manage the inherent uncertainty associated with planning and executing a fixed-bid project and protect its delivery date.

Dimitar Bakardzhiev
on Jun 21, 2015
Q&A on the Book Scenario-Focused Engineering

The book Scenario-Focused Engineering describes a customer-centric lean and agile approach for developing and delivering software-based products. It provides ideas to understand customer needs based upon end-to-end experiences and for designing products in a customer-focused way using a fast feedback cycle.

Ben Linders
on May 22, 2015
Probabilistic Project Sizing Using Randomized Branch Sampling (RBS)

Analyzing all the stories in a project requires significant time. How can we estimate the size of a project without prior identification and analysis of every single user story? If you don't want to analyze all user stories in your project in order to estimate its size then Randomized Branch Sampling is an approach you can use for portfolio related decisions and quotations on prospect projects.

Dimitar Bakardzhiev
on Mar 29, 2015
Q&A on Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly

The book "Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly" by Bertrand Meyer provides a review of agile principles, techniques and tools. It explores the agile methods Extreme Programming, Lean Software, Scrum and Crystal and provides suggestions on what to use or not to use from them, based on software engineering principles and research and personal experience of the book author.

Ben Linders
on Mar 13, 2015
How to Remain Agile When You Have to Sign a Contract?

Agile development based on a contract that has been accepted by lawyers seems impossible. The nature of traditional purchasing and contracting processes does not match the Agile principles. This is a case story of how a supplier cooperated with a client to develop a huge project in an Agile way, by cutting it into smaller pieces and prepare a matching contract based on mutual trust.

Paweł Bejger Peter Horsten
on Jan 29, 2015
Getting RID of Risk with Agile

One of the largest areas of waste in development are poorly formed requirements. This post presents a very simple technique that can be applied to all user stories to improve quality and reduce waste, as well as examining how this can fit into your current planning and estimation workflow via the underused ‘definition of ready’. It’s a very actionable concept that you can apply immediately.

Jacob Creech
on Jan 21, 2015
Q&A with Gojko Adzic on Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories

The book fifty quick ideas to improve your user stories aims to help people to write better user stories, supporting teams in iteratively delivering products that satisfy the needs of their customers. InfoQ interviewed Gojko Adzic about the format of his new book, when and when not to use user stories, the ideas that the book provides, organizing product backlogs and prioritizing user stories.

Ben Linders
on Nov 15, 2014