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User Stories

See here for a good guide on how to write user stories - INVEST: https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/invest/

Types of Stories

Stories (a.k.a. Features)

New functionality that the team will add to the site.

  • Is user-verifiable
    • not "setup database" for example
  • Can include security, for example "Hank the hacker cannot view another user's profile."
  • Can include performance, for example "Mary can see the page load in under 200ms even when there are 200k people on the site."
  • Can include accessibility, for example "Barry can checkout efficiently using a text-only browser."

POs manage the full lifecycle of stories.

Chores

Things that developers need to do in order to improve Software Delivery Performance Metrics. May include:

  • Setting up CI/CD pipelines
  • Automating tasks related to building and deploying the site
  • Updating testing libraries

Chores generally do not include any technical todos related to functionality in user stories. So generally you won't have chores for setting up databases.

POs work with developers to prioritize chores

Developers manage the lifecycle of Chores (e.g. dragging them into "Accepted")

Bugs

When the team breaks something they previously built, it is a bug.

Estimation / Story Points

No need to estimate stories.

Story Lifecycle

Stories generally go through the following states:

  • Icebox - an unprioritized list of ideas that may or may not happen
  • Backlog - a prioritized list of stories, chores and bugs
  • In Progress - stories currently being worked on
    • There should be only one story per pair in progress at any given point
    • Stories should be completed before moving onto another story (except in the case of things being temporarily blocked)
  • Ready for Acceptance - code is complete, and deployed to QA environment and ready for PO to review
  • Accepted - PO reviewed, ready to go to production
  • Deployed to Production - the story is live in the production environment