Task: Refine User Roles and User Stories |
This task describes how to refine user roles and user stories.
Disciplines: Requirements
Purpose
To refine user roles and user stories into a coherent set that they can be used to guide planning, detailing, and development.
Relationships
Roles | Primary Performer: Analyst | Additional Performers: Architect Developer Stakeholder Tester
Inputs | Mandatory: User Role User Story | Optional: [Project Work]
Outputs | User Role User Story
Main Description
Revisit and refine the user roles and user stories that you identified during the initial brainstorming sessions with stakeholders. The purpose of this is to achieve agreement with stakeholders that the set of user roles, personas, and user stories is a good baseline for prioritization, planning. and detailing. This task reoccurs many times throughout the development lifecycle, often as part of iteration planning.
Steps
Refine user roles
Organize and consolidate the list of user roles by combining common user roles and eliminating those that are not important to the success of the project. Update user roles names and descriptions as you move along in refining the user stories. Also, refine descriptions of personas that help you understand what real users expect from the system. See User-Roles Modeling for more information.
Prioritize User Stories
Have stakeholders prioritize the user stories that will be addressed next. This is not only for planning purposes but also for the team to know which high-priority user stories need to be broken down. Low-priority user stories are allowed to be less granular, or less detailed, until they are ready to be developed. See Prioritizing User Stories for more information. Update the list of project work items to reflect the prioritization of user stories.
Break down user stories
Have follow-up story-writing workshops with stakeholders to refine and revise user stories. Some user stories are initially too large in scope (those are also called epics) and need to be broken down into smaller, more manageable user stories. See Breaking Down User Stories for more information. The consolidation of user stories should trigger updates to the list of work items for the project.
Consolidate common user stories
As part of revising and refining user stories, consolidate similar, common user stories to avoid duplication of functionality in the system and waste of time trying to solve similar problem. The consolidation of user stories should trigger updates to the list of work items for the project.
More Information
Concepts | Epics and Themes INVEST Model
Tool Mentors | Managing User Stories with IBM Rational Team Concert
© Copyright IBM Corp. 1987, 2009. All Rights Reserved.