Grow your Product One Exquisite User Story at a Time

Regardless of the number of teams working on a product, or the size of a product, working software and its value starts with and continues to grow one story at a time. Having exquisitely written, small user stories maximizes the speed of that growth and the coordination of work between teams, especially when there are many teams cooperating together. In our experience, a major impediment to writing good user stories in the real word is a lack of example stories. Learn how to write exquisite user stories across a wide variety of domain types using games! This session will introduce advanced user story writing and splitting through a combination of a short presentation and ten unique games which each provide a different insight into user story writing. Some are geared to the who/what/why of stories, others to the different aspects of INVEST, and still others to creating vertical slices and story splitting. There are more than 100 examples of “good” and “bad” tasks, stories, epics, products, and projects. The games are easy to learn, play, and teach so that you can experience good user stories in just a few minutes. Come play the games and then download them and share them with your friends and co-workers!

Learning Outcome:

How to write better user stories.
How to write smaller user stories.
How to identify stories that are really tasks and turn them into stories.
How to break down large user stories into smaller ones.
How to identify user stories that are missing elements.
How to gauge the negotiability, testability, and size of a user story.

Target Audience:

Everyone. The best teams have a common understanding of user stories.

About the Speaker:

Gillian is an Agile Coach at Nulogy Corp, where she works with product development teams to provide consumer goods companies and external suppliers with software that allows them to respond with ease and speed. She grows individuals, teams and organizations through playful facilitation and peer-to-peer learning, partnering with Damon Poole in 2018 to co-deliver the ICAgile ICP-ACC Agile Coach workshop.

Prior to Nulogy, Gillian led teams at Rangle.io, a professional services agency and Oanda a product company in the currency exchange industry, drawing on her background in engineering from MIT.

Gillian has presented sessions at Agile 2018, 2019, Agile & Beyond 2019, Regional Scrum Gathering Canada 2018, Toronto Agile Conference 2017, 2018, Gatineau Ottawa Agile Tour 2017, 2018 and facilitated sessions at TAC Open Space, Agile Coach Camp Canada East and Play4Agile North America on topics from Agile Development with JavaScript to Team Health Checks. Gillian also co-founded the AgileTO meetup in Fall 2015 and was lead facilitator from the first event to Spring 2017.