Speech: Where Is Your User Now, and What Could Go Wrong? The Non-Existent Art of User Story Analysis

Backlog refinements are not enough to make a proper User Story analysis. The one-sentence pattern is not enough to grasp the user’s pain and the anticipated risks and inspire the development team to heal that pain. Sprint planning is insufficient to break down all the knowns and plan enough capacity for the unknowns.

The lack of thorough user story analysis in agile teams is the root cause of most bugs, delays, and frustrations.

We keep complaining at retrospectives about the vagueness of the user stories and the lack of time to discuss them and test them properly. Then, let’s ask ourselves how we, as a company, want our users to feel when they use our feature.

This talk is about a neat, systematic way to analyse a user story. How to build routines to Define as a Team, identify Quality risks early, and turn the user story into compact but thorough Requirements that inspire engineering to solve our actual user needs and free capacity to deal with the unknown.