Developing Epics and User Stories for Testers

An epic is a very large user story that would not be able to be delivered in one sprint. A user story is designed to be delivered within one sprint and should be something that could stand alone in production, even if the desire is that the entire epic is delivered. The user stories are the actual details that drive delivery in a sprint. Testers in the agile projects participate in the refinement of epics into user stories with a particular understanding of the prioritisation of testing and the complexities involved in each user story. It is the responsibility of the product owner to communicate the features that will be refined. User stories are inputs to the tests that the scrum team will execute.

Refining epics into user stories can involve multiple methods:

• Interviews with users
• Workshops
• Document and System Analysis and
• Observing the “day in the life”.

An important part of refining user stories is defining the personas that will be key to the use of the new product. Personas are created to define user roles that focus the development of epics. The creation of personas is an important tool to aide testers in developing scenarios that will model the use of a new product.

Interviews with users

Individuals who hold roles that overlap with new product personas should be included in interview sessions. This will generally be done if there is value in having either one on one or focused panel discussions. These personas are defined by the scrum team and should be used in the refinement of epics. It is important to develop questions for users that are consistent in nature across personas, while also taking into account salient points needing to be understood for individual roles. User expectations of the functionality will be included in the testing matrix. Individual users can also provide information that may be used for negative testing and real-life experiences in the daily work.

Epics are refined when engaging with individual users. The full process of refining user stories will be completed with all scrum team participants to determine how to best deliver workable solutions and the prioritisation.

Workshops

Workshops provide the opportunity for multiple users to engage in discussions on epics and prioritisation. Workshop participants may involve multiple members of the scrum team and individuals that make up a functional team. An organisation may also consider engaging cross functional team members as representatives. Each of the team members participating in the workshop should align with a persona either as part of their current role or in design of new roles.

Workshops are facilitated events designed to encourage collaboration among team members. Requirements can be gathered in a shorter amount of time and the techniques employed in workshops are proven to reduce product defects and manage scope creep. Testers should not only participate but, they can also lead key sections related to developing the testing matrix, test cases and prioritisation. User stories can be refined in workshops and subsequent test cases with acceptance criteria also completed.

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