On Monday night I attended my first Agile East Anglia meeting at the Assembly House in Norwich (hosted by Paul Grenyer a Smart421 associate and sponsored by Smart421) 
where Rachel Davies from Industrial Logic Europe Limited was guest speaker talking about user stories within agile deliveries and the benefits they bring.
Having worked on numerous programmes that have adopted and used agile delivery methodologies and practices (mainly from SCRUM and XP) and have used user stories (“As an X I want to Y so that Z”) to capture the wants and needs of the programme I have found these to be very successful and effective so was keen to learn more; as seemed to be the case of many others with all of the allocated spaces being booked and an extra 2 people turning up for the event despite the blast of Siberian weather that has hit us over the weekend.
Rachel delivered a very comprehensive presentation based on her experiences gained over the last 11 years of using agile methodologies and provided a great introduction on capturing and using user stories effectively that went down well with the audience, who in the majority were fairly new to agile principles; she even had us all working in pairs defining and capturing our own fictitious user stories and defining our own acceptance criteria, which I think all the attendees appreciated.
The time flew by which meant that I wasn’t able to get to cover all of the items that I wanted to such as running effective planning poker sessions, software tools available to support user story capture and management of the delivery of the user stories. I am hoping though that there will be future sessions run by the Agile East Anglia group to cover these items and more aspects and principles within the Agile delivery methodologies.
February 9, 2012 at 12:09 pm
Somehow I missed that this group existed – thanks for pointing it out with the post. Will turn up if I’m ever in Norwich at the right time…
February 10, 2012 at 2:20 pm
I too didn’t know about this. I’m interested in hearing how user stories can be adopted without more detailed use cases as it is often perceived to be one or the other. My experience has always been (when only using user stories) that user stories normally result in a confused delivery team due to the acceptance criteria not being detailed enough and not documenting alternate flows as per a use case. This not only makes estimating/planning difficult but also makes the testers job more difficult as they need to write test cases from the acceptance criteria/alternate flows.
Also Scrum doesn’t lend itself well to controlling scope very well as that’s not really what Scrum is for. Interested in hearing peoples view on this. I firmly believe in unified process to control deliverables and scope as well as the end date implemented using Scrum throughout the unified process life cycle.
February 15, 2012 at 8:19 pm
Agree with your post, Simon — that has been my experience also. I found it confused people through being very detail-light, and disempowered those minded to constructively criticise it, as it’s meant (depending on who you talk to) to be that way. It’s a useful tool but needs to be supported and complemented.
I’m beginning to look at Agile/Scrum through different eyes though. I’ve always been a bit sceptical through a mix of experience and the surety that other approaches were better. In the more recent past, I’m seeing that these other approaches also have downsides. Depending on your perspective, the downsides can appear acute.
It is far from a commendation of Agile/Scrum that it’s not worse! But I wonder if, in shaking things up, as Agile tends to do, some good might come of it.
This is where I’m warming to it — I’m beginning to look at Agile as an agent of behavioural change. Too cynical?
February 15, 2012 at 10:04 pm
Not too cynical at all. Adopting any agile process is a huge mindset change and the most important thing is to ensure the stake holders/business is on board as without them, the process will be much more difficult to succeed.
But it’s not just the stake holders that need to understand this way of thinking and working, it’s the whole delivery team, all the way down to development. It effects how developers write code. I find this is very misunderstood.
I can’t think of delivering software not using an agile process today, I am 100% on board or as the Americans say “I’m all in”. The difficulty I have (which is why I commented in the first place) is I see little value in user stories, at least without some kind of use case or epic that it relates to. I also often see user stories as a replacement for tasks. And user stories are assigned points during the planning or estimating sessions. This is fine in terms of calculating complexity and for the business to prioritise features based on cost as complexity relates to cost. But during iteration (sprint) elaboration or iteration planning stages, those points need to be translated into effort and tasks otherwise how can you plan what you will/wont deliver for a given iteration and how to you measure progress.
Not to mention the overall scope of projects which Scrum is not designed to tackle.
I think we have a long way to go before the industry fully understands and makes use of agile processes efficiently as it’s a whole team mindset shift but I think we are moving in the right direction.
Simon