BMORE SKILLS: Learn to Talk to Your Developers

If you’re not technical, how do you know your development team is on track? In this session, we’ll learn part of the development language, and talk about, tactically, how an idea becomes a product. Whether your development team is in-house or outsourced, “speaking developer” can help you avoid communication breakdowns and draw on both technical and non-technical talent to solve problems.

We’ll do this by working on USER STORIES. Essential for a smooth product development process, user stories are the most atomic units of describable work that a developer can understand.

You’ll be amazed at how much more smoothly the development process goes once you’ve learned this key element of building a product. In this two hour session, we’ll build user stories of our own and take them through the entire development process. We’ll aim to be in and out within 2 hours, so you can park near the Emerging Technology Center. Bring your computers, and your brains.

8:15am - 8:45am
PART 1 - WRITING USER STORIES
● What is a user story?
● The business purpose
● Who writes them / how do they get written
● Interactive session! Practice writing user stories
● Evaluation of practice user stories with tips for improvement
● When should a user story be split into two

8:45am - 9:15am
PART 2 - ESTIMATING USER STORIES
Strategies for estimating work around a given user story:
● Some background--why do we estimate?
● Who should be involved in the estimation process?
● Things that generally increase estimates
● Interactive session: Form an estimate

9:15am - 10:00am
PART 3 - MANAGING USER STORIES
Pivotal Tracker:
● Let’s move one of our stories in
● What the different panels mean
● How to organize them
● How to prioritize them
● The lifecycle of a user story

INSTRUCTOR

Yair Flicker (LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/yflicker)) President @ SmartLogic Solutions (http://smartlogicsolutions.com) - a Ruby on Rails, iOS and Android Development Firm