What’s most important about a user story? Collaboration! How many times have you heard about INVESTing in user stories, making them SMARTer, breaking them into SPIDRs, or biting the whole HAMBURGER? All great! Let me take you through an interactive game for the most important aspect: collaboration! How would you go about teaching your team members about user stories? You have seen people talking about INVEST and/or 3Cs a lot. How many of those talks could be having longlasting effects? How can you make sure that the most important part of writing a user story, the conversation, to happen? How can you make that conversation in a truly collaborative environment for your teams to thrive? In this workshop you will learn how to write user stories by collaborating with others, we are going to divide into groups and work on user stories. No real experience is needed with writing user stories, understanding of them, or even have heard them before. Then we evolve the game into the next phase, user stories and teams. In this phase, we are going to work as a team on user stories, with again focusing on what’s most important. This is an interactive simulation that you can run with your teams. You can use this exercise to emphasize the value of collaboration in writing user stories. In the last phase, we touch on self-organization and leadership aspects of the team. Once you learned this game, you can shape it into what you really want. There are many aspects of an Agile organization or a team is heavily related to how close and collaborative they are, and this is a perfect foundation to build upon.

1. Shahin Sheidaei | sheidaei.com
User Stories by
Collaboration
Shahin Sheidaei
@sheidaei
Agile Games: High Performing Teams and Psychological Safety

2. Shahin Sheidaei | sheidaei.com
● Principal Coach at Elevate Change!
○ Disruptor, & Developer!
○ Agile/Lean Coach, & Change Agent!
● I am passionate about Coaching, Facilitation, & Communities
○ Simple Coaching Model (simplecoachingmodel.com)
○ Agile Lunch (agilelunch.org)
○ Powerful Questions (powerfulquestion.sheidaei.com)
Nice to meet you!
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Activity Time!
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Activity ←
Instructions ←
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Two Teams
Development Team
● You are good at development
● We are in the business of drawing, working
with pen and paper
Business Team
● You are good at detailing out what the
customer wants
Same Size!
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Development Excellence
● The goal is to learn, get better at drawing,
doing Knowledge Transfer, pair up etc.
● There are some material over there, and
some instructions for doing Knowledge
Transfer
● We will call you when your tasks are ready!
● Please visit the Development Corner!
● We come get you in around ~7 minutes.
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Development Center
Practice with the following basic shapes.
Search for Drawing Tutorials on the
net, you’ll find plenty good references!
Use pairing up to learn from the
Senior developers
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Development Center Workbook
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Documentation
● Working intensely to describe what the
customer wants
● We have the best development team
around
● Rules:
○ You cannot draw symbols in your document
○ You cannot show the Developer the
diagram
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7 Minutes - Business Analysis!
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Time to Hand Over
● We are going to invite developers to come
back
● Hand them the perfectly written document,
and go on to our next priority.
● You are heading to a very important
meeting, to Focus on bigger picture and
what’s next.
● You will be back to check on their work.
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13. Shahin Sheidaei | sheidaei.com
Product Development Time
● The goal is to draw!
● You already have done KT and know what
to do.
● We believe in you! Business person need to
go to work on other priorities and will come
back to see the results!
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7 Minutes - Developing the Product!
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Showcase
On a big wall
● Business Person is going to present and
compare with the original ask
● Grade it from 1-10 on satisfaction of the
delivery, 10 the highest
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Performance Review Time
Business People
● You are going to discuss amongst
themselves and rate the Developers.
● You are going to pick one and cherish the
most valuable person.
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Debrief
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Some Change(s)!
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Modern Times!
● One 7 Minutes of Development + Analysis!
● Working next to each other
● Some Rules:
○ Describe what the customer wants to the developer, talk to them
○ Do not use hand gestures, hand holding etc.
○ You cannot show the Developer the diagram
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7 Minutes - Collaboration Round!
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Showcase
On a big wall
● Business Person and Developer are going
to co-present and compare with the
original ask
● They will grade it from 1-10 on satisfaction
of the delivery, 10 the highest
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Appreciation Round
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Debrief
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Congratulations! You just
“wrote” a User Story! 26

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XPPBI in Scrum
User Story is ...
● Writing Requirements
A (locked) shared understanding of (smallest) deliverable value possible!
● Detailed Requirements
● One Person’s Activity
● Having a Conversation
● Clear Understanding
● Team Activity
● ... ● ...
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Some More Changes
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Team Formation Phase
● Team of 5 to 6 people
● One person to volunteer to help the team
● One business person
Business person please come me! New product!
Volunteers please come to me!
Developers, is this familiar?
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Team Norming Phase
● Working as a team
○ What does that mean to you?
● Some Rules:
○ The team can choose how they want to work and develop the product
○ There is no assigned roles in the team other than the team volunteer
○ For business person:
■ Describe what the customer wants to the team
■ Do not use hand gestures, hand holding etc.
■ You cannot draw symbols in your document
■ You cannot show the Developer the diagram
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7 Minutes - Team Round!
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Showcase
On a big wall
● Whole team are going to present and
compare with the original ask
● They will grade it from 1-10 on satisfaction
of the delivery, 10 the highest
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Debrief
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Congratulations! You just delivered a
user story as a team! 35

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Thank You!
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