Learning Agile Requirements with User Story Mapping

The Limited WIP Society Bangalore Chapter held its 2nd Meetup at Pune on Oct 26. The session was hosted by BMC, India and their office. A group of about 25 Lean/Agile enthusiasts met on this Saturday morning.As in the last Meetup in Bangalore, the focus of this Meetup was also Agile Requirements and for the same reason – it is hard to establish flow and reduce cycle time when requirements are not independent, small or testable. Our experience shows that using traditional requirement definition approach, we get a set of highly inter-dependent requirements that get stuck at System Testing, waiting for each other.I started the Meetup with a detailed presentation on Agile Requirements. We discussed about the problem with requirements written the traditional way, how User Stories mitigate that problem, how to decompose User Stories and finally, doing User Story Mapping.Post a short tea break, the group was divided into 2 teams. A case study was given to both the groups. The groups were asked to first identify the sequence of steps defined above. After about 90 min of intense discussions within each of the groups following the 3 step process, both teams had their first version of the User Story Maps, though not complete.Once the User Story Mapping was completed, we discussed how to do Release Planning using the User Story Map. A follow-up question was about User Story estimation. The group was introduced to the Planning Poker approach. The Meetup ended with a quick summary of the session and a retrospective of what worked well and what could be improved in the next Meetup.

 

 

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