User stories - what, how, who and when?

One of the most fundamental problems facing a project is how you decide on, document, and manage your requirements. Obviously Agile software development promotes handling this very differently than a Waterfall approach. One mechanism used by Agile projects to track requirements is the ?User Story? - but what are they, how are they created, who uses them, when and how, within the development cycle?Based on their collective experiences in agile projects, in this session Sandy and Douglas aim to answer - or at least generate lots of discussion on! - these questions and more....This presentation assumes you have a basic knowledge of iterative development and are familiar with the agile principles.

Our speakers - Sandy Mamoli and Douglas Talbot

Sandy Mamoli is one of NZ's leading agile advocates, is a Certified Scrum Master and became New Zealand's first Certified Scrum Practitioner in October 2007. Sandy has a passion for using agile to bring true business value to companies and is motivated by helping organisations understand and adopt the fundamentals of Scrum.One of Sandy's major agile initiatives was working on SonyEricsson's global enterprise website, which was a distributed agile programme of work (Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Mumbai). She has since coached many project teams including teams at the ACC and NZ on Screen and is currently working as an independent Scrum Coach at Mercury Projects.Douglas Talbot has been working in the Wellington I.T. scene for the last 16 years after completing a degree in Computer Science at Victoria Uni. He has been a bit of a generalist having been a VMS operator, C programmer, BA, and DBA. For the last 5 years he has managed I.T. teams of various types and got very side tracked in this time with trying to bring Agile principles to his teams. Douglas is currently ?Manager Migration Projects? at Metservice running a large programme of work with Agile teams.