I had the chance these past few weeks to do my first real SCRUM project.
My task was, next to a content governance model, to deliver a “Product Backlog”.
A Product Backlog is a collection of user stories, ordered by business value and risk.
A user what? A user story! What is that ?
Well, a user story is a specific requirement that a role has. For example:
As a content editor, I need to edit and save a page to a new version in order to improve the text on my site.
And just like the SMART acronym, user stories have to be INVEST worthy:
– independent
– negotiable
– valuable
– estimatable
– small
– testable
In short: the user story is the user who writes down in his own language what he wants to do and why. Next, he / she puts them in the order of importance to them.
The next step is to show these to the technical team. They can add their own lines, like estimations, or technical questions on the story.
This way of working is ofcourse very similar to use cases and Business rules. But I like the small lines that we came up with, so the technical team can use their fantasy in order to build the best functionality they envision!
I will be sure to use these techniques again in other projects!