CSC 321.01, Class 09: User stories

Overview

• Preliminaries
  • Notes and news
  • Upcoming work
  • Good things to do
  • Questions
• User stories
• Format of user stories
• Assessing user stories
• Some examples
• User stories in testing (aka behavior-driven design)
• User stories in planning

Preliminaries

News and notes

• Alumni mentors visit next Wednesday. Please try to clear lunch time, 4pm for their talk, (and 1pm, if possible).
• I have not yet had time to rearrange the schedule. I’m currently trying to figure out when my first free moment will be.
• From your mentor: Please remind the 321 students that I will have a mentor session from 7-8 on Sunday and another one from 6-8 on Thursday but no session for 321 on Tuesday.

Upcoming work

• Hartl 5 due Tuesday at 10:30pm.
  • Extend by two days. Please break up your work.
  • I need to find a three-hour block to write that assignment.
  • Python people should find an alternative.
  • You will have time to work on it on Monday.

Good things to do (Academic/Artistic)

• MET opera on Saturday.
• Contra dance Friday at 8pm in Younker Lounge. Live music!
• Two cool shows in the Faulconer.
• Islam week events next week (details forthcoming)
• Megan Goering design talk on Tuesday
• Wednesday visitors.
• I’ve been told that there’s something on campus that doesn’t fit my worldview: A concert on Rathje 3rd. Saturday 3rd.

Good things to do (Other)

Friday PSA

• I brought BAC cards

Questions

User stories

• A way of understanding the requirements of your application from the perpsective of those who will be using the application.
• A user has something that they want to do, which is enabled by techology.
• How will the user employ the technology to achieve their goal.
• Ideally, gathered from talking to your users.
  • What are their goals?
  • How will they use it?
• They are a tool for communication.
• And they can serve as tools in the software construction process.
  • The core of your task list
  • A mechanism for testing

Format of user stories

• Feature: A general name for what we are trying to achieve
• Actor (As this-kind-of-user)
• Goal (So that I can something I want to achieve)
• Action (I want to be able to do this)
• Examples - Help make sure that we all understand the Actor/Goal/Action triplet.

Assessing user stories

Here’s one way to think about user stories

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-Boxed

Here’s another, taken from http://agileforall.com/new-to-agile-invest-in-good-user-stories/

• Independent
• Negotiable
• Valuable
• Estimable
• Small
• Testable

Examples: SpamR

Feature: SpamR

• As a member of the faculty of Grinnell College
• So that I can gather emails that people send to the csstudents mailing list
• I want to use SpamR service

Comments

• Does not meet SMART
• Doesn’t have a clear motivational goal
• Doesn’t have a clear process
• Why did I receive two identical answers to this question?

Feature: gather emails that people send to the csstudents mailing list

• As a faculty member
• So that I can keep track of emails that are sent to the csstudents mailing list
• I want to create a service that gathers emails sent to the csstudents mailing list

Feature: SpamR

• As a student at Grinnell College,
• So that I can filter and access emails that are sent to CS students emailing list
• I want to use SpamR service.

Feature: Research Opportunity Detection

• As a student,
• So that I can be informed about all potential research opportunities,
• I want to automatically be forwarded any potential research opportunities by looking at certain words in the email title and body.

Feature: List of events on Tuesday 13th February 2018

• As a student
• So that I can update the college calendar with Computer Science events,
• I want a list of all Computer Science events mentioned in the emails scheduled to happen on 2/13/2018.

Feature: List events

• As a student
• so that I can
  • enhance my computer science education with extracurricular activities
  • so that I can determine if there are any events I want to attend (or at least that I want to do more than ___)
  • so that I can figure out where not to be on campus
  • find public food
• I want to
  • find events by title
  • find all the events sent to the CS mailing list that mention a certain day
  • tag emails with a phrase
  • …
• For example,
  • Given all the things that were posted in the past week
  • If I search for “2018-02-14”, I should see
    • Cool alumni mentors on campus!
    • Inclusion in computing talk at 4:15 pm.
    • Tentative WinC meeting at 7:00 p.m.

Other partial stories …

• As a student employee of communications
• so that I can update the calendar and keep my job
• …

And another

• As an SEPC member
• so that I can update the calendar and promote my department

Feature: ???

SpamR should save every email that gets sent to the csstudents, and be able to organize by sender, time-sent, or content & would need to have a username and password to be able to access all the emails. This is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and we could timebox it.

• “Organize by sender” is specific
• “Organize by time-sent” is specific
• “Organize by content” is not specific; different people will implement it differently given that dettail.
• “Prevent those who lack an account from reading” is specific.
• [Not in the standard format.]
• No person.
• No name.
• No mtivational goal

Examples: Course planner

Feature: Create a good schedule

• As a student,
• so that I can plan my courses such that I do not take too many hard courses in one semester,
• I want to see the ratings of each course in terms of hardness.

Feature: (untitled)

• As a student,
• so that I can spend less time worrying about signing up for classes,
• I want to be able to enter in my four-year plan and automatically sign up for the necessary CS courses without doing it every semester.

Feature: CS Course Planner

• As a CS student at Grinnell College
• So that I can track planned offerings of courses in the CS department
• I want to use the CS course planner

Feature: Students can search for courses by courseID

• As the department chair,
• So that students can look for the exact section of a course they want,
• I want to search for courses in the course planner by courseID

User stories in testing (aka behavior-driven design)

• Good stories include examples.
• With some practice, you can turn those examples into test.
• Thing that people miss:
  • Tests live in a separate realm. They generally do not access your current database.

User stories in planning

• See above.