A quick thank you to Arin Sime and the local Agile Leadership Network chapter for an excellent workshop. Tonight, Arin Sime of AgilityFeat facilitated a workshop on User Story splitting. What I felt was compelling was not the discussion about the best size of a user story, what INVEST was, or even the best way to write a user story. What I liked the most about the workshop was Arin's purposeful misdirection early on, having us write bad user stories. That's right. Arin gave us instructions and had us write bad user stories by way of anti-patterns. In software engineering, an anti-pattern is a pattern that may be commonly used but is ineffective and/or counterproductive in practice. Sometimes it's hard to write really good user stories. Knowing if it's a good story usually falls under IKIWISI (I'll know it when I see it), though people can commonly write really bad user stories and think they are great. I'm not going to go into detail about what makes a "good" user story. I'm about to turn into a pumpkin and I wanted to get this post out within hours of the event.
If you get a chance, look up Arin and look up Agile Leadership Network. Either way, you're going to walk away with something of value.
Image Source: My really sad Droid X