Writing Agile User Story and Acceptance Test Requirements

Poor requirements are often the major cause of project problems. Yet nobody does much about them—at least not effectively. Traditional approaches advocate writing voluminous requirements documents that often don’t help much and may even contribute to difficulties. Agile goes to the opposite extreme, relying on brief requirements in the form of three-line user stories that fit on the front of an index card and a few user story acceptance criteria that fit on the card’s back. In this exercise-focused interactive workshop, Robin Goldsmith reveals reasons user stories and their acceptance tests can fall short of their hype, explains critical concepts needed for effectiveness, and uses a real case to provide participants guided practice in writing and evaluating user stories and their acceptance criteria/tests. Join Robin for a discussion of agile and user story fundamentals, REAL Business deliverable whats vs. product/system/software feature hows requirements, the conversation conundrum, identifying user story acceptance criteria, turning criteria into tests, issues of defining requirements as tests, and adequacy of defined user story acceptance tests.