Blog
Story Splitting – Guidelines and Tips
Story splitting - refinement to an optimal granularity An apparently small story may turn out to be much bigger than expected. Only by refinement or story splitting can you discover this. Story splitting can be done early or just before the preceding sprint. We recommend doing it as early as possible to avoid late surprises. We consider "story splitting" and "story refinement" as very similar activities. It's about optimising the granularity of the written user story. What are user stories For those teams that are able to colocate, the user story can be just a reminder of a conversation. [...]
Requirements Elicitation and AI
Requirements Elicitation - Explained Requirements Elicitation is about discovering the real business requirements and the system requirements of any software endeavour. It is first about discovering what is needed and then about articulating the distilled discoveries into a artefacts that can be used as the basis for describing what needs to be done. It is unusual that the real business requirements (and subsequent system requirements) can be rapidly found. Although requirements elicitation is sometimes referred to as requirements gathering, this is a misleading phrase. The real requirements are more like buried treasure in a field as apposed to crops that can be reaped. [...]
User Story Quality Assurance – Automated
Let us look at how and why we might want to quality assure user stories. Poor user stories lead to unnecessary meetings, waste and rework. Improving user story as early as possible in the development lifecycle is an effective way of minimising waste and rework. Quality assurance is a systematic approach to determine if a "product" meets acceptable criteria. For the QA of user stories we need to first define what does good like? What is the difference between a good user stories (and set of user stories) vs poor quality. For agile software development we tend to [...]
Requirements Quality Assurance – Released by ScopeMaster
PRESS RELEASE Marlow, UK. November 28, 2022 Solving the Problem of Poor Software Requirements Scopemaster Ltd has released a powerful requirements QA capability in their software requirements analyser that examines, tests and reports on the quality of written requirements. This unique capability allows software teams to fix problems before coding even starts. It can help all software projects reduce the risks of delay and rework caused by unclear requirements specifications. Reducing risks on projects everywhere On all software projects, the requirements need to be right, or the wrong thing gets built. But writing good, clear requirements is difficult. The old phrase "garbage [...]
Example User Stories – Analysed and Tested
In this article we explore the results of using the user story analysis tool, ScopeMaster on an example set of user stories (access originals here). The stories we have used are published by Mike Cohn on the Mountain Goat website, they describe the functions of an interactive website to be built. About the Example User Stories We have chosen these example user stories as they are freely available and are published by a well known author of books on the subject of writing software user stories. They are examples that anyone can download. (The PDF actually contains examples for three different projects). For [...]
Backlog Grooming – automated with ScopeMaster
Backlog grooming, or backlog refinement is the work that is done to analyse and improve and estimate user stories, epics and technical tasks yet to be done by the team. When a software team has a list of work to do, this is known as the backlog. Backlog grooming is the work done by the team, ususally led by the business analyst or product owner to clarify each requirement that is about to be assigned to a sprint. Who performs Backlog Grooming At first pass this needs to be performed by the product owner or business analyst, thereafter the whole team needs to ensure [...]