Analyzing user stories
Have you written a nice user story? It can be part of an epic but it will resolve a particular problem. The aim is always the same: to produce working software! This utility on your software must work. No matter if the user story is about a specific epic or theme, we're analyzing how to prepare ourself to bring the user story done and all the tasks solved with all acceptance criteria respected and all user acceptance tests passed.
Can we do the job without difficulties? The answer is: yes no problem! Go and do a good job! Or no we can develop this feature, we are working on legacy code, we are working on a specific part of software we don't know... In this case you must take your time to plan every single step. It's not unusual and you may need another user story of analysis to discover problems, criticisms and every trouble you can discover in advance. This will allow to split the user story even the original user story will be the same. And it will allow you to estimate the story with less uncertainity. No matter if even the story points will be same.
HINTS TO ANALYZE YOUR STORY POINT
- Split task if possible. Estimate the time to dedicate to tests and production
- Analyze acceptance criteria very carefully
- Write the user acceptance tests
I hope these hints will be useful to anyone are starting to use the scrum framework. I'll take time to dedicate more and related posts to user acceptance test, task splitting and user story analysis. And sure I accept any comments to improve this post.