They called me in to coach this Scrum team because their product owner wasn’t accepting their user stories. “I don’t understand it,” the Scrum Master told me. “Our burndowns are perfect!” And I looked, and they were. I mean text-book perfect. Going back at least six sprints, the team’s daily completed task rate nearly always matched the guideline set out by the tool. They rarely added tasks after the first day of the sprint and never after the second. Tasks totals matched the

Previously, I said that one way for teams to get better quickly is to make their User Stories smaller. 3-5 points, half a sprint or less. This is a great way to improve your team’s overall output, quality, and flexibility. But sometimes, User Stories can get too small. When I was still very new to Agile, I attended a workshop where they talked about writing your User Stories super small. Their team had shifted from counting Story Points each Sprint to the counting the number

When doing estimates with relative sizing techniques, we recommend using numbers in the Fibonacci sequence rather than t-shirt sizes (S, M, L), 1-10, percentages, or other similar values. While you can use any sequence you want, Fibonacci has specific features that help you do better relative estimates and make your estimates more useful. Numbers in general are useful because you can add them up to create a velocity value, which helps the team plan their sprint and can t

Middleware developers often have a tough time writing clear user stories because unlike consumer software, middleware rarely has clear users. Developers may wind up either using the same vague “API Customer” user repeatedly or dropping the “user” from their stories entirely. But having a meaningful user in mind for stories can prevent a lot of problems. Here are some creative ways to use personas as your users for middleware. The “user” in a user story value statement gives u

As an Agile coach, I’m asked a lot of questions about writing user stories. At the top of the list: "how do I write a good user story?" and "Give me an example of a good user story." That second request is tricky, since what's good for one person might not make sense to another. But I'll tackle the first question here with some examples. First of all, I highly recommend using the "value statement" template to write all user stories, features, and even high-level items like ep