Yesterday's discussion of User Stories reminded me of a template Kane Mar had provided during my ScrumMaster Certification course. The template is designed to work on 3x5 cards and travel within the task board, as do our Project Backlog Items today.
The front of the cards say:
Story Title
As a X
I want Y
So that Z
Think of the story title as "what you'd call it if you were making a movie of it".
X is the person who will benefit from this story being delivered.
Y is the content of the story.
Z is the benefit the story will deliver.
This is great because it makes the business value explicit, so the programmers understand what the customer hopes to get from the story. Often the actual benefit can be delivered by a different Y, but that will discovered during planning.
The back of the cards are divided into two columns, labeled:
| User... | Application... |
| Clicks the Skull and Crossbones. | Erases the hard-drive. |
These represent the top level acceptance criteria.
When the user can do all of those things, and all the corresponding things happen, I'm done. At Decade Software today, our use cases are broken into tables that track exactly these same steps.
You can imagine some interesting patterns here. For example, if Z is just a restatement of Y, the customer typically hasn't thought through the real value of the story. Stories even vanish during planning for this reason—following statements like...
"I guess we don't actually need that feature."
or...
"I thought you said we needed that option."
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