Questions are important, questions illuminate, questions remove assumptions, questions create good thinking. Here are some questions to use when elaborating agile user stories. Please leave your favourite elaboration questions in the comment section:
| Question | |
|---|---|
| Process | Has the story been created collaboratively? |
| What | Do you as a team have a shared understanding of the story? |
| Process | Does this story meet your elaboration step definition of done? |
| INVEST | What is the problem or need addressed by this story? |
| What | Who is this story for? |
| INVEST | Why is this story valuable? |
| Vision | Does this story fit with the higher level vision? |
| Vision | Is this aligned with current strategy? |
| What | What are we testing with this story? |
| Why | What risks are we mitigating? |
| INVEST | Can the story be finished within the relevant timebox? |
| INVEST | Are the acceptance criteria testable? |
| INVEST | At what level will we test this? |
| INVEST | How can we demo this? |
| Process | Is the story written as … As a …… I want ……. So that ……… |
| Why | What does the user really want to do? |
| What | Is this the right story? |
| What | What is the real challenge with this story? |
| What | What documentation is required? |
| INVEST | Is this story feasible? |
| INVEST | Can we slice it? |
| INVEST | Is this story Independent of others? |
| INVEST | Will we be blocked by external dependencies? |
| INVEST | Does the story have an estimate? |
| INVEST | Can we increase estimate confidence? |
| Acc Criteria | How will you know this story is done? |
| UX | Have you considered the user experience? |
| UX | Would a user journey, story board, workflow diagram, sketch or mock-up add something to this elaboration? |
| UX | Would creating a model help? |
| Process | Is your current elaboration process helping you develop solutions as quickly as possible? |
| Why | What hypothesis is this story testing? |
| Acc Criteria | Are the acceptance criteria a yes/No question |
| UX | Have you had a conversation with a user? |
| What | Do you have any examples? Can these examples be executed? |
| INVEST | How will we measure success? |
| Decay | What is the best before date for this story? At what point will this story need to be re-elaborated? |
| What | What is the simplest solution? |
| INVEST | What splitting pattern applies here? |
| What | What is a small experiment we can do to prove this hypothesis? |
| Do we need to take a break? |
References:
Bill Wake – INVEST
Sketch and Scrum 