What are Scrum User Stories and who is involved in Estimating Agile User Stories? The Development Team play an important role within the estimation of Scrum user stories within an Agile project.
Estimating Scrum Tasks
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Estimating Agile User Stories for Developers – Part 2
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The product owner role is responsible for prioritizing the user stories. This prioritization gives developers notice of what they will be working on next. Through extensive research is wasteful this early in the development process, it does give developers a high-level overview. This gives them a better understanding of how and where each small piece will fit together and provide consideration for other development tasks.
Estimating Agile User Stories: Estimation
Once user stories have been approved and prioritized, they must be estimated. Where traditional development uses hour estimates, Agile development uses story points. These story points do not translate directly to time but give a general idea of effort. They are relative and indicate which user stories require more or less work than others.
Within the estimation phase, developers are valuable because they know their own abilities and limitations. They know what they can accomplish and whether user stories are small enough to be taken care of within a sprint. One of the key elements of Agile is that new features are delivered at the end of each sprint. If a user story isn’t finished by the end of the sprint, stakeholders are given one less new feature that they expected.
Estimating Agile User Stories: Commitment
The final phase of user stories is commitment. With a fully fleshed out and estimated user story, they are then committed to a sprint. While this does not guarantee that a user story will be completed within the sprint, it does mean that the development team believes they can finish it.
Developers have given most of their expertise in earlier phases of user story creation. For commitment, they simply commit to what they will be working on in a sprint. They can then begin the development of the features.
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Learn More: Estimating and Planning User Stories
User Stories Applied
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User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn is one of our favourite books on Agile User Stories. The book starts with an overview into user stories, and details what a user story is and the different aspects of them. He then discusses how to go about writing a user story, and provides details of the INVEST criteria that can be used to determine if the story is meeting all of its objectives. Next Mike gives an in depth discussion of who user stories are written for and where to begin when gathering the details for them. The book then discusses acceptance testing user stories, including how to go about specifying these criteria and the responsibilities of the development team and customers during this process.
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Estimating Scrum User Stories
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Our Favourite Agile Books
We found these books great for finding out more information on Agile Scrum: