Agile Stories: Whats the story?

XYZ System: Agile Stories to Brainstorming.

Section Summary:

1. If you at least get everyone to ask the same way then you'll add clarity and consistency.
2. If you go to the next step and expand the context you'll understand your project better.

A Story in Agile is the name you give your idea.
The idea that you want to turn into a reality.

We all have our Stories. Do these ideas sound familiar?

‘I want a new payment system on our website’
‘We need a better way to route the vans’
‘I want every customer to give me a five star review’
‘I need more sales’
‘I need a holiday’

Why use a Story?

Owners, managers, employees, customers, Birds (Birds? more later…) are all stressed out, all feeling pain. If there’s no way to do something about peoples stories, everyone feels pain pain.
If you have not felt this pain in your life then congratulations.

Ah really I need to listen to everyone’s story??!!! *$%^”!
Yes, and no….
Dispair not, your pain is from resisting solving the problem.
It’s easily solvable, you just need a good system.

The Story Begins.

Stories are a consistent way to capture needs, wants and ideas.
For consistency stories are written in a specific way.

The format used in Agile is “As a ….. I want ….. so that”

Let me explain, because I did not understand this from any of the documentation I read when I started using Agile.

Our previous example:

‘I want a new payment system on our website’

Becomes

‘As the person who verifies the website payments in accounting I want a new payment system on the website so that its integrates with our accounting software.’

Same want, much clearer context.

If you never do anything else to relieve pain, at least train your organisation to ask the same way!
That’s the first win. A good basic solid start.

Brainstorming begins.

Now that we’re clear on what the original Author of the story wants then we can begin expanding. At this point the story might be assigned to the engineer or builder or whoever the problem solver is.

The Engineer and the Author begin brainstorming. The reason they both work on brainstorming is because the next step is to use ‘As a’ to expand the context.

To make this easier to understand, I decided to use XYZ system to build a project.
I chose the building of a birdbath in my garden…

“As a home owner, I want to make a birdbath so that the birds can drink and bathe.”

And of course , “As a person who is telling you how to do things I want to uses my own system so that I can demonstrate that the system works.” ha ha

‘As a’ becomes the Jumpoff point for Brainstorming.

This is where the process can even be a bit fun.

I’m not just a home owner…. I do many things, but in this case it’s me as the home owner that wants this birdbath, the Author.
Here’s a key point I might not be the builder of the birdbath…or even the user of the birdbath.

One of the main users of the bird bath willl be the birds.
So you get to be a bird for a while…

As a bird i want a place to cool down.
As a bird i want a place to drink
…………………….that is safe from predators
…………………….that i won’t get disease from

When do you get the chance to be a bird?
By ‘being’ a bird you get to capture all the needs of a bird with birdbath facilities.
Remember the bird is not the only agent, theres the garden user.

As the garden user…
As a garden user I want something that looks good.
As a garden user I want something that has running water noise.
…………………..something that does not cost a lot to run or maintain.
………………………………. does not get in the way of the path down the garden.

When you’ve done the main ones you can expand your brainstorming.

As a neighbour I want to keep my privacy….
As a builder i’ll need to get a digger in here…
As an amoeba….

You might be wondering if you need to consider every possible eventaulity.
You don’t need to go crazy.
I’ve been asked, do you think you please everyone? can you really think of all points of view?
No.

That’s not the point here.
The point is to at least understand the needs of the original Author of the story and all those that will certainly be affected by it.
This initial part of the Brainstorming is a fantastic way to finding the boundaries of the project.

In summary.
1. If you at least get everyone to ask the same way then you’ll add clarity and consistency.
2. If you go to the next step and expand the context you’ll understand your project better.

Just these two things alone will reduce pain / friction / stress in your organisation.
A word of warning, if you make change (like this) in your organisation and simply try to force things thorugh then you’ll just get more pain. There’ll be more later on communication as part of the XYZ system.