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.
Recommended Further Reading
The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course: