From Unclear and Unrealistic Requirements to Achievable User Stories
"What do you want the system to do?" can be a loaded question for agile teams. Ideally, the product owner gives you a product backlog with fully groomed user stories prioritized by business value, ready for team discussion and estimation. Instead, you may have the “big picture” product owner who can describe high level requirements but struggles to provide clear direction on specific system behavior, or the “aspiring developer” product owner who is more than happy to give you exact system implementation in intricate technical detail. You may have the “kid in a candy shop” product owner who wants everything under the sun as the highest priority or the “see-saw” product owner who constantly changes the priority of the requirements. Join Jamie Lynn Cooke for interactive demonstrations of twelve proven techniques for working with all these product owner types to understand what is really driving their requirements, to move them toward business value-driven prioritization, and to turn their abstract, impractical, or technically-loaded requirements into relevant and realistic invest-compliant user stories.
As a senior solutions consultant, business analyst, and project manager, Jamie Lynn Cooke has delivered successful solutions for many organizations across twenty-six industry sectors in Australia, Canada, and the United States. She has worked with every type of user you can imagine—and some that you would not believe—to turn their abstract, unclear, and unrealistic requirements into achievable business solutions. Passionate about productivity, Jamie Lynn spends her spare time researching and trialing methods that help people maximize the effectiveness of their work. She is an award winning author of several books on agile methods, including The Power of the Agile Business Analyst.