User Stories Workshop

Exercise to help product owner become familiar with standard story format and able to write a good user story.

This workshop is intended to train Product Owners in writing effective user stories. The goal in writing stories is not to work out details, but to discover the most important goals for the project and to organise a project into discrete, testable chunks.

Remember to keep your user stories at the end of this workshop, as you will need them again in the build workshop.

Required material

• Index cards or Post-It notes

• pens

Workflow

1. Select a goal

Pair with one or more colleagues and choose a project goal. This goal can be a fictional or real-world goal.

2. Write user stories

Get everyone to write stories for 15 minutes that will advance the project goal. Stories are written on index cards or post-it notes and should follow the correct format: “As a \_ , I need a __ in order to ___”.

3. Refine user stories

After 15 minutes, go through your user stories together, delete duplicates and refine the remaining user stories to make them as self-contained as possible. A self-contained story should be understandable when read back to the user or developer, without a lot of explanation needed.

4. Prioritise user stories

Prioritise the user stories in an absolute order, with the highest priority at the top. There are no ties; a specific order must be chosen. Open discussion is allowed, but in the end, you as the Product Owner have authority to set the actual priorities. Things might change as you discover new information, and the backlog can be re-ordered — but at any one time it is an absolute ranking.