{"id":79,"date":"2008-07-14T23:36:44","date_gmt":"2008-07-14T23:36:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quinert.com\/blog\/xml-rss2.php?itemid=73"},"modified":"2008-07-14T23:36:44","modified_gmt":"2008-07-14T23:36:44","slug":"investing-in-user-stories-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/2008\/07\/14\/investing-in-user-stories-revisited\/","title":{"rendered":"INVESTing in User Stories, revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mike Cohn’s<\/a> “User Stories Applied” discusses using the INVEST mnemonic as a guide to writing better user stories. I was recently asked to dig up a reference for it, and found this presentation here<\/a>, with the section on the mnemonic on pages 47 and 48.<\/p>\n

As I read it, I noticed that there’s been a change to one of the letters. Whereas the book uses ‘S’ to denote ‘Small’, now it’s become ‘Sized appropriately’.<\/p>\n

I think this is a change for the better, as I noticed that every time I talked someone through the acronym, I would have a long-winded conversation qualifying ‘Small’ as ‘Just small enough but no smaller’. This would come about as I tried to explain the tradeoffs between a story being small enough to estimate with some reasonable certainty, small enough to fit within an iteration, and still ensuring that stories are ‘V- Valuable to the customer’, needing to ensure that user stories continue to express clearly a problem or need of a person. <\/p>\n

Overly small stories push us further from the original context of the problem, and thus force us to compensate with an increasing heirarchy of ‘super-stories’ to help us focus on the bigger picture. These become more noticable when working in shorter iterations than might be common on a Scrum project, so three cheers for Mike in spending the effort to come up with ‘Sized appropriately’.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mike Cohn’s “User Stories Applied” discusses using the INVEST mnemonic as a guide to writing better user stories. I was recently asked to dig up a reference for it, and found this presentation here, with the section on the mnemonic on pages 47 and 48. As I read it, I noticed that there’s been a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,25,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agile","category-analysis-skills","category-requirements","category-software-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.software-testing.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}