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A new talk in the making? (User) Stories for Developers

At Ingewikkeld, we hold internal presentations to share knowledge between us. Recently, it was my turn; I wanted to tell a story, on stories.

In our field of Software Engineering, one of the hardest things (besides naming) is to break down work into manageable pieces of work. In this presentation, I demonstrated how you take a complex feature request, and break it down into User Stories that are considered SMART.

Writing a good User Story is not as easy as it seems to be, because as an author you need not only write down what you would like, but also:

  1. How it should work
  2. What it should look like
  3. What errors may be presented
  4. Where else it may touch the system (if it does; I recommend not)

All the while, you aim to keep a User Story limited in scope. It’s a nice balancing act.

It proved far too easy to fill a whole hour on this topic; so I decided to write an entire talk and bring it to you at a User Group or other meetup soon.

Meanwhile, if you would like certain content to be included, have questions or just want to share a funny anecdote from your own experience: Use the comments, Luke.

Until next time!