Fifty Quick Ideas To Improve Your User Stories

https://gyazo.com/752d297251366da7ac9cc09bc371b830

Creating stories

Tell stories, don’t write them 10

Don’t worry too much about story format 12

Describe a behaviour change 14

Describe the system change 16

Approach stories as survivable experiments 18

Watch out for generic roles 20

Evaluate zone of control and sphere of influence 22

Put a ‘best before’ date on stories 24

Planning with stories

Set deadlines for addressing major risks 28

Use hierarchical backlogs 30

Group stories by impact 34

Create a user story map 36

Change behaviours using the CREATE funnel 38

Set out global concerns at the start of a milestone 40

Prioritise according to stages of growth 42

Prioritise using purpose alignment 44

Make a stakeholder chart 46

Name your milestones 48

Focus milestones on a limited number of user segments 50

Discussing stories

Use low-tech for story conversations 54

Imagine the demonstration 56

Diverge and merge for story discussions 58

Involve all roles in the discussion 60

Measure alignment using feedback exercises 62

Play the devil’s advocate 64

Divide responsibility for defining stories 66

Split business and technical discussions 68

Investigate value on multiple levels 70

Discuss sliding-scale measurements with QUPER 72

Splitting stories

Start with the outputs 76

Forget the walking skeleton - put it on crutches 78

Narrow down the customer segment 80

Slice by examples of usefulness 82

Split by capacity 84

First dummy, then dynamic 86

Simplify outputs 88

Split learning from earning 90

Extract basic utility 92

When all else fails, slice the hamburger 94

Managing iterative delivery

Don’t push everything into stories 98

Budget instead of estimate 100

Avoid using numeric story sizes 102

Estimate capacity based on rolling number of stories 104

Estimate capacity based on analysis time 106

Pick impacts instead of prioritising stories 108

Never say ‘no’ - say ‘not now’ 110

Split UX improvements from consistency work 112

Get users to opt in to large UX changes 114

Check outcomes with real users 116

Throw stories away after they are delivered 118

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