- Managing the Product Backlog
- Collaborating to Groom the Product Backlog
- Ranking User Stories with a Dot Voting Method
- Illustrating User Stories with Storyboards
- Sizing User Stories Using Comparison
- Splitting User Stories Along Business Values
- Tracking User Stories with a Collaboration Board
- Delivering a Coherent Set of User Stories
- Planning Work with User Stories
- Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Summary
In this chapter, you saw how to groom the product backlog by ranking, illustrating, sizing, and splitting user stories. You learned the importance of having a product owner—someone who not only leads backlog grooming, but also ensures that it is done in collaboration with stakeholders and the development team. You learned how to use collaboration boards to track user stories during the grooming process. Finally, this chapter concluded by explaining how to organize a delivery plan that provides immediate value to the stakeholders through the use of story mapping.
When a story has gone through the process of grooming, you have reached an important milestone, which is the transition from conversation to confirmation. If user stories and their storyboards help monitor conversations with stakeholders, success criteria help confirm expectations. Success criteria convey additional information about the story and establish the conditions of acceptation. They enable the team to know when it is done and they say, in the words of the stakeholders, how they expect to verify the desirable outcome. In this perspective, success criteria are a specification as important, if not more important, than the story. Success criteria are a key element of executable specifications. Therefore, the next chapter is dedicated specifically to the issue of confirming user stories.