Third & Fourth session at Agile Management (Scrum Master) course at University of Washington

Oh yes - third & fourth. It was a long Saturday : 9 to 4 :)
Today's session with Stein Dolan, was mostly oriented toward Product Owner (PO)'s role in Scrum, user stories development in large part.

Traditional models like waterfall define what, to reach "low" unknowns' level. At the end, they start implementation part - "How".
Agile models like Scrum define "what" and "how" pretty much together to achieve a decreasing curve, due to simultaneous reactions.

User Stories: are requirement / deliverable for a sprint (or initially production backlog).
Card - Token representing requirement that reflects priority & cost (effort estimate)
Conversation - mostly verbal but possible supplemental documentation can be presented
Confirmation - Acceptance of what needs to be done and called be done.

Card:
As a << user >>
I want to << goal >>
so that << value >>
Where, user - end user of the product
            goal - feature
            value - why feature is important or gives

For example, As a user I would like my search results to be paginated so that I do not have to scroll through a long list of items

A nice question came up with this: How 500 user stories are better than 500 pages of documentation?
My take is that user stories are very very short, and provider better management possibilities of prioritization and partial releases.

We went through a series of exercises:

1. Prepare a vision statement for given project definition
   (where we want to build a web site to connect various organizations like soccer teams, PTA, church to build communities)
2. Prepare list of user roles you can think of
   (again following the same above short project definition)
3. Preapre 3 releases and their features
   (on how do you want to execute and release some features on the given project)
4. Prepare user stories
   (Write actual user stories for the features defined so far)
5. Prepare acceptance criteria for user stories
   (Write sort of functional tests to define acceptance requirement for the particular user stories)

Epic user stories : are the ones not decomposed to valuable, estimable, sized & testable ones.
Theme: is a collection of related user stories
Epic is a theme when split into smaller stories

Wow, that was a lot in a day. But, lunch buffet was good at Bombay Grill (Indian Restaurant) in University of Washington Seattle campus.

These are just notes that I am taking on my blog, but I want to revisit major topics as I learn more in ongoing sessions.

Onwards...