1.
W9
Session
10/26/2016 1:30:00 PM
When User Stories Are Not Enough
Presented by:
Tony Higgins
Blueprint Software
Brought to you by:
350 Corporate Way, Suite 400, Orange Park, FL 32073
888-­‐268-­‐8770 ·∙ 904-­‐278-­‐0524 - info@techwell.com - http://www.starcanada.techwell.com/

2.
Tony Higgins
Blueprint Software
A leading expert on all things software application lifecycle related, Tony Higgins
has amassed a broad base of skills and experience in software and technology
marketing, development, delivery, and enablement. With experience in both
start-up and enterprise-level organizations, Tony offers a comprehensive
perspective on both the technical and business requirements that drive
successful implementation results.

3.
10/2/2016
© 2015 Blueprint Software Systems Inc. All rights reserved. | 1
WHEN USER STORIES ARE NOT ENOUGH
Tony Higgins
© 2016 Blueprint Software Systems Inc. All rights reserved. │ 1© 2016 Blueprint Software Systems Inc. All rights reserved. │ 1
• Challenges in IT
• Traditional Requirements in IT
AGENDA
Traditional Requirements in IT
• How Agile changed (is changing) IT definition
• Emerging Process and Technology
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DEFINITION CHALLENGES IN IT
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LARGE, COMPLEX, DISTRIBUTED
DEFINITION CHALLENGES IN IT
Marketing COMMITMENTS
Executive
HR
Finance
Legal
Line of Business 1..n
IT
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M&A
Supply Chain

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DEFINITION CHALLENGES IN IT
DISTRIBUTED AND OUTSOURCED TEAMS
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DEFINITION CHALLENGES IN IT
LEGACY SYSTEMS
• Every project has to contend with legacy
• IP in the source code, tests, end-users
• How to define aspects that they impact?
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Business Rule
Structural Assertion Action Assertion Derivation
DEFINITION CHALLENGES IN IT
BUSINESS RULES
Terms
Facts
Employee, timesheet, leave,
responsibility centre
Student worker is a type of
employee
Condition
Authorization
An employee’s manager or the
individual acting as the employee’s
An employee cannot exceed his/her
yearly paid leave allowance
Calculation
Inference
Yearly paid leave allowance is the
employee type percentage multiplied
by the number of working days in a
year
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Attributes
Relationships
Employee is known by a first
name, middle initial and last
name, or an employee number
All employees belong to a
responsibility centre
Integrity &
Validation
individual acting as the employee s
manager can approve the employee’s
leave
A manager or the individual acting as
manager can approve the leave after
it has been accepted by Human
Resources
Inference
An employee is considered a new
employee if the employee has not
been assigned to a responsibility
centre
http://www.businessrulesgroup.org
DEFINITION CHALLENGES IN IT
NONFUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS
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Ian Sommerville. Software Engineering (6th edition). Addison-Wesley

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CHALLENGES IN IT
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Business & Infrastructure
Big,Complex Rules Legacy
Authorities
Regulations, standards, …
g
Commitments
Rules
Nonfunctionals
g y
Definitions
needs
Validation
application
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Application Development
Distributed,
Outsourced

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TRADITIONAL REQUIREMENTS
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Chronic issues with individual requuirements:
• Correct?
• Feasible?
• Verifiable?
• Necessary?
• Ambiguous?
Chronic issues with sets of requirements:
• Complete / Missing?
• Conflicting?
• Levelled?
• Traceable?
TRADITIONAL REQUIREMENTS
Ambiguity … “Mary had a little lamb”
Mary owned a lamb.
Had: Held in possession, acquired, accepted, marked or characterized by, held in a position of
disadvantage, tricked or fooled, beget, ate, ...
Lamb: A young sheep, a gentle person, a pet, a person easily cheated or deceived (esp. in
trading securities), ...
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Mary gave birth to a small sheep.
Mary ate some mutton.
Mary conned a mild-mannered person.

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Ambiguity …
TRADITIONAL REQUIREMENTS
• Negative Requirements (esp. double, triple negatives)
• Boundary Conditions (exact boundaries often missed)y ( )
• Synonyms (like … but not exact)
• Pronouns (referential)
• Abbreviations (i.e., e.g. Examples are ‘samples’)
• Adverbs (subjective/qualitative by nature)
• A/B (‘feature/function’ = or? and? Sometimes?)
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When not clear, and there are barriers to clarifying, people will make assumptions and move on …
TRADITIONAL REQUIREMENTS
Declarative Text Graphical Models
Text vs. Graphical Models
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TRADITIONAL REQUIREMENTS
Exhaustive Traceability
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TRADITIONAL REQUIREMENTS
Doing the same work over and over …
• Issue: Detecting opportunities for reuse
• Not obvious when embarking on work
• Reusable work not ‘discoverable’
• Issue: Mechanism for reuse
• C t i d i t h i
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• Copy-paste is predominant mechanism
• Heavy maintenance when things change

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TRADITIONAL REQUIREMENTS
Weigers * RUP **
Taxonomy Examples
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* http://www.processimpact.com
** http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/content/RationalEdge/jan01/WhatIstheRationalUnifiedProcessJan01.pdf
TRADITIONAL REQUIREMENTS
Specifications Examples
Higher Level
Lower Level
Exhaustive textual documents
Exhaustive textual documents
High-level Use Cases
High-level Scenarios
Detailed Use Cases
Detailed Scenarios
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Lower Level Exhaustive textual documents Detailed Scenarios
“Agile – The Good, the Hype and the Ugly” Bertrand Meyer
“Specification by Example” Gojko Adzic

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PROBLEMS WITH TRADITIONAL REQUIREMENTS
The heart of the problem is that traditional approaches produce
requirements that become disconnected from real users' needs
and experiences; they create complex and complicated
solutions to problems that users don't have, fail to deliver
solutions to problems that they do have, and sometimes create
whole new problems that users didn't have before.
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Kurt Bittner, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
AGILE IS CHANGING IT APPLICATION DELIVERY
B i i
Big, Complex Problems
Nonfunctionals
Business commitments
• Time-boxed
• Incremental
• Collaborative
• Alignment
• Phased
• Milestone-driven
• Specialization
• Siloed
Inertia
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Legacy
Regulations Rules
Distributed / Outsourced

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AGILE IS CHANGING IT APPLICATION DELIVERY
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https://interaktco.com/blog/project/making-waterscrumfall-work/
USER STORIES
Format:
As a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason>.
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Role, Persona
“Who”
Goal, objective
“What”
Reason, value
“Why”

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USER STORIES
Story Title:
As a Customer, I want Withdraw Option, So that I can get cash from ATM machine.
Given I have a positive balance in my account
When I withdraw an amount from my account
Then ATM displays success message
Given I have a zero balance in my account
When I withdraw an amount from my account
Then ATM displays error message
Given I have <Balance> in my account
When I withdraw <Amount> from my account
Then ATM displays <Message>
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OBSESSION FOR COMPLETENESS
Specifications Examples
Higher Level
Lower Level
Exhaustive textual documents
Exhaustive textual documents
High-level Use Cases
High-level Scenarios
Epics
Detailed Use Cases
Detailed Scenarios
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Lower Level Exhaustive textual documents Detailed Scenarios
User Stories

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• Excessive “So That” Story
• Overly complex; Multiple parts.
• The “Odyssey” Story
CLASSIC USER STORY PROBLEMS WHEN IT TRANSITIONS TO AGILE
• The “Vague Persona” Story
• Classic is “the user”; Being specific helps
• The “Odyssey” Story
• Beyond and epic; Diffused to point of no value
• The Waterfall Story
• Contains only design or technical aspects; no
business value.
• The Rigid Story
• Too much detail, precluding different, creative
to limit scope
• The “System” Story
• Doesn’t speak of value delivery
• The “Parakeet Value” Story
• “So that” is a repeat of “I want”. Missing
th l
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Too much detail, precluding different, creative
solutions
• The “For Whom” Story
• Written for the role who doesn’t
experience/realize the benefit
https://www.agileconnection.com/article/identifying-and-improving-bad-user-stories?page=0%2C2
the value.
• The “Technie Value” Story
• “So that” is a technical capability, not a
value.
DEFINITION VS. WORK
completion
construction
concept
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Blueprints Workplan

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USER STORY DICHOTOMY
Work
I
Definition
Item
Business
Stakeholders
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Item
IT
REQUIREMENTS & TESTS TIGHTLY RELATED
requirementrequirementrequirementrequirementi t
requirementrequirementrequirementrequirementrequirementrequirementrequirementtestsrequirementrequirementrequirementrequirement
Both describe what the
system needs to do and
Less
Detail
More
Detail
qrequirementrequirementrequirementrequirementRequirements
qrequirementrequirementrequirementrequirementrequirementtestsrequirementrequirementrequirementrequirementrequirementrequirementrequirementTests
system needs to do and
how well it needs to do it
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Code Test Yes
NoCandidate
Deployed
User
Validated?

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REQUIREMENTS & TESTS TIGHTLY RELATED
ATDD
TDD
Unit
Tests
Deliverable
Code
Automated
Acceptance
Tests
Acceptance
Criteria
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customer
• User Stories are a better Unit of Definition than a traditional statement
• Structured meaning they always provide who, what, why
OBSERVATIONS FOR DEFINING IN LARGE-SCALE IT USING AGILE:
• They help stay aligned with needs during development
• Why User Stories are Not Enough in IT
• Quality of the user stories
• Poor accounting for nonfunctionals, business rules, regulations, dependencies
• Large-scale decomposition, visualizing and analyzing complexity, seeing the ‘big picture’
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g p , g y g p y, g g p
• The need for traceability
• Independence of Definition and Workplan

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EMERGING PROCESS & TECHNOLOGY
Disciplined Agile Delivery Scaled Agile Framework
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http://www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com/ http://www.scaledagileframework.com/
Regs/Policies
Nonfunctional
Business
Rules
Domain Model
EMERGING PROCESS
& TECHNOLOGY
Screen Mockups
As a ___ I want to ___ so that ___
Acceptance criteriaBusiness
Stakeholder
Developer
Tester
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Examples
Auto-
Generate
Executable
specifications
(.feature file)
Each row is an ‘example’.
Business Rules drive the ’examples’.
Concordian
SpecFlow
Cucumber
Fitnesse
……..
Processes / Scenarios User Story

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Generate
Feature FileFeature File
Generate User Stories
Test Automation Frameworks Run
Feature files in Verification and
Production environments
Test Results
reflected back in
stories
WHEN USER STORIES ARE NOT ENOUGH
Tony Higgins
© 2016 Blueprint Software Systems Inc. All rights reserved. │ 34© 2016 Blueprint Software Systems Inc. All rights reserved. │ 34

20.
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• Ensure you’re accounting nonfunctionals, business rules, regulations
• Use traceability prudently – only when ROIUse traceability prudently only when ROI
• Leverage graphical modeling – at minimum scenarios and wireframes
• Leverage emerging framworks and technologies
• Leverage process and technology for definition reuse
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