Bill Wake
Bill Wake is a senior coach with Industrial Logic, Inc. Before that, he managed software development at Gene Codes Forensics and had been an independent consultant. He has been teaching, writing about, and coaching XP and agile methods since 2000 and has worked with teams in a variety of domains, including biotechnology, financial systems, Web sales, and more. Bill is the (co-)author of several books, including Design Patterns in Java and most recently Refactoring in Ruby. His personal Web site is at xp123.com; Industrial Logic’s is at industriallogic.com.
Track abstract - Development Process & Methodology
To Make a Long Story Short: Splitting User Stories
When user stories mix both high- and low-value functionality, or embody too many or unrelated customer needs, the flow of value slows. Until the whole story is finished, nobody benefits from its most valuable parts. Even worse, lower-value parts of this story block higher-value parts of the next one. Large stories can increase project risk because the core part of a story is often the riskiest part. While agile methods support incremental development, large stories can force a particular overall path even when the team would be better off taking advantage of earlier feedback. Join Bill Wake as he examines bundling and unbundling, splitting and merging. He shares concrete techniques that can split stories along high-level, user-experience, non-functional, and complexity lines. Take away a toolkit of at least twenty ways you can split user stories to increase value flow and customer satisfaction
Track abstract - Testing
Storytesting
Agile teams measure their progress by looking at delivered stories—features that users value. Many agile teams produce solid unit tests (e.g., using Test-Driven Development). Such tests are great, but they only establish that the parts are working; to ensure that we’re doing the right thing at the story level, we have to test at that level as well.
Storytesting is the process of creating acceptance tests (preferably automated) that customers can understand and value. You’ll take away ideas for how to write effective storytests, how to divide the work, and tools and trends. (This session will mostly be tool-agnostic, focused on techniques over tools.)
