Rethink: User Stories & Epics

As we move into the development phase, we're getting more and more immersed in the Agile Development method of project management.

The most basic currency is the user story. This is a combination of a type of user, function and purpose.

You can group together similar user stories into an epic.

During a sprint, the development team works on a small number of user stories towards eventually completing an epic. Each user story is weighed for importance and worked on by various developers. When the sprint is done, there's a whole lot of reflection and room for improvement (i.e iteration) before the next sprint begins.

Here are some examples of user stories in our project:

  • As a content author I want to automatically create a paragraph chunk when I hit the return key So chunks can be created more easily
  • As a staff member I want to look at all the people who work in a department so I can figure out who I need to email about a work question
  • As a student I want to be able to tell in the interface when I am looking at Official Catalog requirement info so that I know what i'm seeing is the real deal
Here's a screenshot of the tool we're using to project manage.



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