Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories

Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories PDF Author: Gojko Adzic
Publisher: Neuri Consulting Llp
ISBN: 9780993088100
Category : Agile software development
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book will help you write better stories, spot and fix common issues, split stories so that they are smaller but still valuable, and deal with difficult stuff like crosscutting concerns, long-term effects and non-functional requirements. Above all, this book will help you achieve the promise of agile and iterative delivery: to ensure that the right stuff gets delivered through productive discussions between delivery team members and business stakeholders. Who is this book for? This is a book for anyone working in an iterative delivery environment, doing planning with user stories. The ideas in this book are useful both to people relatively new to user stories and those who have been working with them for years. People who work in software delivery, regardless of their role, will find plenty of tips for engaging stakeholders better and structuring iterative plans more effectively. Business stakeholders working with software teams will discover how to provide better information to their delivery groups, how to set better priorities and how to outrun the competition by achieving more with less software. What's inside? Unsurprisingly, the book contains exactly fifty ideas. They are grouped into five major parts: - Creating stories: This part deals with capturing information about stories before they get accepted into the delivery pipeline. You'll find ideas about what kind of information to note down on story cards and how to quickly spot potential problems. - Planning with stories: This part contains ideas that will help you manage the big-picture view, set milestones and organise long-term work. - Discussing stories: User stories are all about effective conversations, and this part contains ideas to improve discussions between delivery teams and business stakeholders. You'll find out how to discover hidden assumptions and how to facilitate effective conversations to ensure shared understanding. - Splitting stories: The ideas in this part will help you deal with large and difficult stories, offering several strategies for dividing them into smaller chunks that will help you learn fast and deliver value quickly. - Managing iterative delivery: This part contains ideas that will help you work with user stories in the short and mid term, manage capacity, prioritise and reduce scope to achieve the most with the least software. About the authors: Gojko Adzic is a strategic software delivery consultant who works with ambitious teams to improve the quality of their software products and processes. Gojko's book Specification by Example was awarded the #2 spot on the top 100 agile books for 2012 and won the Jolt Award for the best book of 2012. In 2011, he was voted by peers as the most influential agile testing professional, and his blog won the UK agile award for the best online publication in 2010. David Evans is a consultant, coach and trainer specialising in the field of Agile Quality. David helps organisations with strategic process improvement and coaches teams on effective agile practice. He is regularly in demand as a conference speaker and has had several articles published in international journals.

Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your Retrospectives

Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your Retrospectives PDF Author: Tom Roden
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780993088124
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
Learn how to improve retrospectives and avoid stagnation, with fifty ideas designed to help you enhance and energise your continuous improvement effort. This book will help you get better outcomes from retrospectives and from any continuous improvement initiative. It will help you consider how best to prepare for retrospectives, generate innovative insights, achieve valuable outcomes, improve facilitation techniques, keep things fresh and maybe even how to have a bit of fun whilst doing it. This book is for anyone who undertakes continuous improvement of any sort, especially those looking to get better outcomes from retrospectives, either as a participant, facilitator, coach or manager of teams. We include ideas for people with varying levels of experience. So, whether you are just getting started with Scrum and retrospectives, or a veteran of continuous improvement looking to fine-tune or get new ideas, or if your retrospectives have become a bit stale and need re-invigorating, there are ideas in here to support you.

Impact Mapping

Impact Mapping PDF Author: Gojko Adzic
Publisher: Provoking Thoughts
ISBN: 9780955683640
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A practical guide to impact mapping, a simple yet incredibly effective method for collaborative strategic planning that helps organizations make an impact with software.

Specification by Example

Specification by Example PDF Author: Gojko Adzic
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1638351368
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Summary Specification by Example is an emerging practice for creating software based on realistic examples, bridging the communication gap between business stakeholders and the dev teams building the software. In this book, author Gojko Adzic distills interviews with successful teams worldwide, sharing how they specify, develop, and deliver software, without defects, in short iterative delivery cycles. About the Technology Specification by Example is a collaborative method for specifying requirements and tests. Seven patterns, fully explored in this book, are key to making the method effective. The method has four main benefits: it produces living, reliable documentation; it defines expectations clearly and makes validation efficient; it reduces rework; and, above all, it assures delivery teams and business stakeholders that the software that's built is right for its purpose. About the Book This book distills from the experience of leading teams worldwide effective ways to specify, test, and deliver software in short, iterative delivery cycles. Case studies in this book range from small web startups to large financial institutions, working in many processes including XP, Scrum, and Kanban. This book is written for developers, testers, analysts, and business people working together to build great software. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book. What's Inside Common process patterns How to avoid bad practices Fitting SBE in your process 50+ case studies =============================================== Table of Contents Part 1 Getting started Part 2 Key process patterns Part 3 Case studies Key benefits Key process patterns Living documentation Initiating the changes Deriving scope from goals Specifying collaboratively Illustrating using examples Refining the specification Automating validation without changing specifications Validating frequently Evolving a documentation system uSwitch RainStor Iowa Student Loan Sabre Airline Solutions ePlan Services Songkick Concluding thoughts

Writing Effective User Stories

Writing Effective User Stories PDF Author: Thomas and Angela Hathaway
Publisher: BA-Experts
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 51

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Book Description
WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT? This Book Is About the “Card” (User Story: Card, Criteria, Conversation) User Stories are a great method for expressing stakeholder requirements, whether your projects follow an Agile, Iterative, or a Waterfall methodology. They are the basis for developers to deliver a suitable information technology (IT) app or application. Well-structured user stories express a single action to achieve a specific goal from the perspective of a single role. When writing user stories, stakeholders knowledgeable about the role should focus on the business result that the IT solution will enable while leaving technology decisions up to the developers. Good user stories are relevant to the project, unambiguous, and understandable to knowledge peers. The best user stories also contain crucial non-functional (quality) requirements, which are the best weapon in the war against unsatisfactory performance in IT solutions. This book presents two common user story structures to help you ensure that your user stories have all the required components and that they express the true business need as succinctly as possible. It offers five simple rules to ensure that your user stories are the best that they can be. That, in turn, will reduce the amount of time needed in user story elaboration and discussion with the development team. This book targets business professionals who are involved with an IT project, Product Owners in charge of managing a backlog, or Business Analysts working with an Agile team. Author’s Note The term “User Story” is a relative new addition to our language and its definition is evolving. In today’s parlance, a complete User Story has three primary components, namely the “Card”, the “Conversation”, and the “Criteria”. Different roles are responsible for creating each component. The “Card” expresses a business need. A representative of the business community is responsible for expressing the business need. Historically (and for practical reasons) the “Card” is the User Story from the perspective of the business community. Since we wrote this book specifically to address that audience, we use the term “User Story” in that context throughout. The “Conversation” is an ongoing discussion between a developer responsible for creating software that meets the business need and the domain expert(s) who defined it (e.g., the original author of the “Card”). The developer initiates the “Conversation” with the domain expert(s) to define the “Criteria” and any additional information the developer needs to create the application. There is much to be written about both the “Conversation” and the “Criteria”, but neither component is dealt with in any detail in this publication. A well-written User Story (“Card”) can drastically reduce the time needed for the “Conversation”. It reduces misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and false starts, thereby paving the way for faster delivery of working software. We chose to limit the content of this publication to the “User Story” as understood by the business community to keep the book focused and address the widest possible audience. WHO WILL BENEFIT FROM READING THIS BOOK? How organizations develop and deliver working software has changed significantly in recent years. Because the change was greatest in the developer community, many books and courses justifiably target that group. There is, however, an overlooked group of people essential to the development of software-as-an-asset that have been neglected. Many distinct roles or job titles in the business community perform business needs analysis for digital solutions. They include: - Product Owners - Business Analysts - Requirements Engineers - Test Developers - Business- and Customer-side Team Members - Agile Team Members - Subject Matter Experts (SME) - Project Leaders and Managers - Systems Analysts and Designers - AND “anyone wearing the business analysis hat”, meaning anyone responsible for defining a future IT solution TOM AND ANGELA’S (the authors) STORY Like all good IT stories, theirs started on a project many years ago. Tom was the super techie, Angela the super SME. They fought their way through the 3-year development of a new policy maintenance system for an insurance company. They vehemently disagreed on many aspects, but in the process discovered a fundamental truth about IT projects. The business community (Angela) should decide on the business needs while the technical team’s (Tom)’s job was to make the technology deliver what the business needed. Talk about a revolutionary idea! All that was left was learning how to communicate with each other without bloodshed to make the project a resounding success. Mission accomplished. They decided this epiphany was so important that the world needed to know about it. As a result, they made it their mission (and their passion) to share this ground-breaking concept with the rest of the world. To achieve that lofty goal, they married and began the mission that still defines their life. After over 30 years of living and working together 24x7x365, they are still wildly enthusiastic about helping the victims of technology learn how to ask for and get the digital (IT) solutions they need to do their jobs better. More importantly, they are more enthusiastically in love with each other than ever before!

Modern Software Engineering

Modern Software Engineering PDF Author: David Farley
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN: 0137314868
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description
Improve Your Creativity, Effectiveness, and Ultimately, Your Code In Modern Software Engineering, continuous delivery pioneer David Farley helps software professionals think about their work more effectively, manage it more successfully, and genuinely improve the quality of their applications, their lives, and the lives of their colleagues. Writing for programmers, managers, and technical leads at all levels of experience, Farley illuminates durable principles at the heart of effective software development. He distills the discipline into two core exercises: learning and exploration and managing complexity. For each, he defines principles that can help you improve everything from your mindset to the quality of your code, and describes approaches proven to promote success. Farley's ideas and techniques cohere into a unified, scientific, and foundational approach to solving practical software development problems within realistic economic constraints. This general, durable, and pervasive approach to software engineering can help you solve problems you haven't encountered yet, using today's technologies and tomorrow's. It offers you deeper insight into what you do every day, helping you create better software, faster, with more pleasure and personal fulfillment. Clarify what you're trying to accomplish Choose your tools based on sensible criteria Organize work and systems to facilitate continuing incremental progress Evaluate your progress toward thriving systems, not just more "legacy code" Gain more value from experimentation and empiricism Stay in control as systems grow more complex Achieve rigor without too much rigidity Learn from history and experience Distinguish "good" new software development ideas from "bad" ones Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

What Drives Quality

What Drives Quality PDF Author: Ben Linders
Publisher: Ben Linders Publishing
ISBN: 9492119145
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 117

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Book Description
With plenty of ideas, suggestions, and practical cases on software quality, this book will help you to improve the quality of your software and to deliver high-quality products to your users and satisfy the needs of your customers and stakeholders. Many methods for product quality improvement start by investigating the problems, and then work their way back to the point where the problem started. For instance audits and root cause analysis work this way. But what if you could prevent problems from happening, by building an understanding what drives quality, thus enabling to take action before problems actually occur? What Drives Quality explores how quality plays a role in all of the software development activities. It takes a deep dive into quality by listing the relevant factors of development and management activities that drive the quality of software products. It provides a lean approach to quality by analyzing the full development chain from customer requests to delivering products to users. I'm aiming this book at software developers and testers, architects, product owners and managers, agile coaches, Scrum masters, project managers, and operational and senior managers who consider quality to be important. A book on quality should be practical. It should help you, the reader of this book, to improve the quality of your software and deliver better products. It should inspire you and give you energy to persevere on your quality journey. What drives quality tries to do just that, and more. This book is based on my experience as a developer, tester, team leader, project manager, quality manager, process manager, consultant, coach, trainer, and adviser in Agile, Lean, Quality and Continuous Improvement. It takes a deep dive into quality with views from different perspectives and provides ideas, suggestions, practices, and experiences that will help you to improve quality of the products that your organization is delivering. This book views software quality from an engineering, management, and social perspective. It explores the interaction between all involved in delivering high-quality software to users and provides ideas to do it quicker and at lower costs.

Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter

Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter PDF Author: Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062953826
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER For the first time, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson opens up about his amazing comeback—from tragic personal loss to thriving businessman and cable’s highest-paid executive—in this unique self-help guide, his first since his blockbuster New York Times bestseller The 50th Law. In his early twenties Curtis Jackson, known as 50 Cent rose to the heights of fame and power in the cutthroat music business. A decade ago the multi-platinum selling rap artist decided to pivot. His ability to adapt to change was demonstrated when he became the executive producer and star of Power, a high-octane, gripping crime drama centered around a drug kingpin’s family. The series quickly became “appointment” television, leading to Jackson inking a four-year, $150 million contract with the Starz network—the most lucrative deal in premium cable history. Now, in his most personal book, Jackson shakes up the self-help category with his unique, cutting-edge lessons and hard-earned advice on embracing change. Where The 50th Law tells readers “fear nothing and you shall succeed,” Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter builds on this message, combining it with Jackson’s street smarts and hard-learned corporate savvy to help readers successfully achieve their own comeback—and to learn to flow with the changes that disrupt their own lives.

Learn Estonian - Quick / Easy / Efficient

Learn Estonian - Quick / Easy / Efficient PDF Author: Pinhok Languages
Publisher: Pinhok Languages via PublishDrive
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
A curated Estonian word frequency list Are you looking for unconventional ways to speed up the process of learning Estonian? Then this book is exactly what you are looking for. Following the Pareto principle (80/20 rule), this book is built to streamline the learning process by concentrating on the core words and sentence structures that make up everyday conversations. The result is a unique vocabulary book with 2000 of the most important Estonian words and phrases ordered by their frequency of use. Who this Estonian learning book is for: This book is for beginners and intermediate learners of Estonian who are self-motivated and willing to spend 15 to 20 minutes a day on learning vocabularies. The simple structure of this vocabulary book is the result of taking all unnecessary things out allowing the learning effort to solely be spent on the parts that help you make the biggest progress in the shortest amount of time. If you are willing to put in 20 minutes of learning every day, this book is very likely the single best investment you can make if you are at a beginner or intermediate level. You will be amazed at the speed of progress within a matter of just weeks of daily practice. Who this Estonian frequency list is not for: This book is not for you if you are an advanced learner of Estonian. In this case, please go to our website or search for our Estonian vocabulary book which comes with more vocabularies and is grouped by topic which is ideal for advanced learners who want to improve their language capabilities in certain fields. Furthermore, if you are looking for an all in one Estonian learning book that guides you through the various steps of learning Estonian, this book is most likely also not what you are looking for. This book contains vocabularies only and we expect buyers to learn things like grammar and pronunciation either from other sources or through language courses. The strength of this book is its focus on quick acquisition of core vocabularies which comes at the expense of information many people might expect in a conventional language learning book. Please be aware of this when making the purchase. How to use this Estonian workbook: This book is ideally used on a daily basis, reviewing a set number of pages in each session. The book is split into sections of 50 vocabularies which allows you to step by step progress through the book. Let’s for example say you are currently reviewing vocabularies 101 to 200. Once you know vocabularies 101 to 150 very well, you can start learning vocabularies 201 to 250 and on the next day skip 101-150 and continue reviewing vocabularies 151 to 250. This way, step by step, you will work your way through the book and your language skills will jump with each page you master. Some final thoughts: Like many language hacking methods, this book is quite unconventional in its approach, but for a driven person that uses it correctly it can significantly speed up the learning process. Vocabulary books have been around for centuries and as with so many things that have been around for some time, they are not very fashionable and a bit boring, but they usually work quite well – and that is what counts in the end.

High Risk, High Reward: The Journey of an "underdog Entrepreneur" who Took Chances, Overcame Obstacles, and Built a $50 Million Business.

High Risk, High Reward: The Journey of an Author: Steve Scher
Publisher: Acrobat Advisors
ISBN: 9781733448505
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
The ink was barely dry on the contract when panic struck. After sinking his life savings into an underperforming company, Steve Scher found he had purchased a business with two unreliable employees, a culture rife with sabotage, no real systems for marketing and sales, and a shabby office located in one of San Francisco's roughest neighborhoods - the Tenderloin District! Determined to fulfill his entrepreneurial dream, Steve rebuilt his company from scratch. Overcoming virtually every roadblock possible, Steve grew the business into a $50 million company with 18 offices coast-to-coast and thousands of loyal employees. . After 14 years at the helm, Steve sold his company for 8 figures. Steve's business journey inspires entrepreneurs in the throes of running a demanding business as well as aspiring entrepreneurs looking to pursue their passion and live the American Dream. It's true - you CAN build and sell a successful business! Packed with creative solutions, this guide to business success includes: Steve's personal formula for entrepreneurial success - Low risk, low reward / High risk, high reward - and how this can radically transform your business Real-world tips to create a culture of agility and loyalty The pros and cons of growing organically vs. acquisitions How to make technology work for you - and your bottom line Inspiration to fight for your business every day! Tips to build out your business and maximize value How to implement a unique social-responsibility recruitment strategy: Hire military vets, reformed ex-offenders, and people with special needs A checklist to prepare your exit strategy, so you can get the highest sale price possible and experience true financial freedom! High Risk, High Reward is an inspirational story of entrepreneurialism - and your go-to reference guide for business success. Keep it on your bookshelf and refer to it often. Business advisor Steve Scher guides business owners to achieve ultimate success and financial freedom. An exceptionally successful entrepreneur, Steve led Acrobat Outsourcing to achieve annual revenues of $50 million. www.AcrobatAdvisors.com