The Limited WIP Society Bangalore Chapter held its 3rd Meetup at Digite’s Bangalore office. A group of 20+ Lean/Agile enthusiasts met on Saturday morning at 10am.
The focus of this Meetup was Agile Requirements. This topic was chosen because it is hard to establish flow and reduce cycle time when requirements do not follow the INVEST principle (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small and Testable). Using traditional requirement definition approach, we get a bunch of highly inter-dependent requirements that get stuck at System/Integrated Testing for each other.
I started the Meetup with a small introduction to the need for Agile Requirements. Post this session, Manik Choudhary, Agile Project Manager at SAP Labs, started the main session. He gave a high level overview of the larger landscape – building the product vision using Lean Canvas, using Design Thinking to validate your concept and then use a technique like User Story Mapping to build the product backlog.
With this high level view, he started with the basics of User Story Modeling. This was done in 3 stages. First, identify the vision of the product by defining the usage sequence of the product. Next, identify the Personas who will use the system and how each of those personas will use the product in the above Usage Sequence. This is the “backbone” of the product. Finally, define the user stories under each of the usage steps (within the usage sequence) for each of the personas.
With that overview, the team started the workshop. The group was divided into 2. A case study was given to both the groups. The groups were asked to first identify the usage sequence. After about 90 min of intense discussions within each of the groups following the 3 step process, both teams had their first version of the User Story Maps (see picture). Our team could only finish User Story definition for only 2 of the 3 personas that were in the case study.
At this stage, the teams were asked to vote and identify the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
Finally, USM is not a one time exercise. The process is repeated, perhaps once a month, complimented by a more frequent Backlog Grooming.
The Meetup ended with a quick summary of the session and a final retrospective of what worked well and what could be improved in the next Meetup. As the retrospective showed, it was a great learning experience on a Saturday morning!
Sudipta Lahiri 