Meet Valery: I believe in individuals and team teams driving the changes in organizations and a big part of my job deals with engineers writing codes and the leadership interacting with these engineers. I try to find ways to help both the individuals and teams follow the agile values and principles. For scrum teams and or Kansan teams, writing Epics, Features, User stories and task does not make your team agile but we can used them to follow or stay within the guideline of agile principles. while working with teams I try to keep those agile and values and principles in mind to help me and the team in the decision process, and here are some to keep in mind.

• Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

• A working software is the primary measure of progress

• Simplicity, the art of maximizing the amount of work not done is essential

Since working software is how we measure progress, then we need to organize around this principle on how we manage and track our work and communicate it out. Some of the way my teams have been doing these is to try and visualize their work so it’s visible to everyone within and out of the team to see what is in progress and what has been completed. One of they ways to represent the work is through user stories writing in simple words of what the user (customer or end user) will like to see and there is a template.

As a User

I want to what you want to do …. (action)

So that values….

Acceptance Criteria

……

……

As a fitness club member,

I need to be able to view freecycle classes remaining today,

so I can decide if I want to go.

As a fitness club member,

I need to be able to view freecycle classes at my club tomorrow,

so I can decide if I want to go.

Note a user story touch the following, Who wants what, What is it that they want, and why do they want it. Teams can increase the quality of development will increase the quality of the software (working code).

Some Terms to know

Backlog

Prioritized list of what an agile team will deliver

Sprint Backlog

Committed list of User stories by the team to be completed with a sprint

INVEST

Independent Negotiable Valuable Estimable Small Testable; model used to determine a well-articulated user story

Persona

The tool used to represent a user role characterizing the user as a specific

the person that can be empathized with; helps teams focus and discuss how user goals differ from person to person

Product vision

The framework that inspires the team to form a common goal; includes target group, goals, needs, values, and key features

Roadmap

Defines key features and characteristics needed to achieve the product vision

Story map

A visual aid to help the team organize user stories

User stories

Technique to assist teams in understanding exactly what they are building; must include a who, what, and why and the acceptance criteria to help the team size the story.