User Stories

"A user story is a short, simple description of a feature told from the perspective of the person who desires the new capability, usually a user or customer of the system. User stories typically follow a simple template:

As a type of user, I want some goal so that some reason.

https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/user-stories

Example: As an admin user, I want only those who are invited to be able to register for an account so that there is limited access to data in the system that contains lots of personally identifiable information (PII).

Tickets and the Keystone

• A user story can be a single ticket or broken out into separate tickets.
• Tickets will be assigned a story point value based on the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34). You can also use t-shirt sizes.
• The story point vlaue is based on a Keystone User Story.

"You can stabilize the estimates by establishing a keystone story. The idea here is to keep some degree of consistency as you go from sprint to sprint by having a User Story of known size against known definition of done so that all estimates for the team are based off this one User Story."

https://www.hanssamios.com/dokuwiki/establish_a_keystone_story

Some factors that can help when evaluating a keystone are:

• How complicated is the task?
• Does it require new infrastructure?
• Are there external dependencies out of your control?
• Are developers familiar with this part of the code?

You can always change the keystone if the entire team agrees.

Scrum Poker

1. Everyone reads the ticket and gets clarification.
2. Everyone assigns a story point value to the ticket without telling anyone else.
3. At the same time, everyone shows their story point value to the group.
4. If team members have different estimates, then the team needs to discuss in order to come to a consensus.
5. You can use notecards or mobile apps to create your Scrum Poker cards.

https://www.atlassian.com/blog/platform/a-brief-overview-of-planning-poker