Epics and User Stories

Background
Adrian, Diederik and I sat down and came up with a lightweight process to add more descriptive, higher level project descriptions to the backlog. We used the first release of UMAPI/UserMetrics to model how this actually worked in practice. We think this will be sufficient for a while but there are definitely some issues, particularly around tooling that we should review.

Process

 * 1) Product Owner works with Stakeholders on Epics -- high level description of user value
 * 2) We ask our stakeholders to prioritize these stories
 * 3) Product Owner breaks down Epics into User Stories -- a sprint level task that generates user value
 * 4) Systems Non-functional requirements (SLAs, capacity, etc) defined on a system level
 * 5) Developers turn User Stories into Technical Tasks

Tools

Mingle 'Feature' Cards correspond to a User Story But we have a hard time managing specific tasks

Strategies to deal with that: - Make smaller cards - Use Asana to manage taks - Check with dev team

Example

Epic:

As a grantmaker, I want to be able to create and query specific cohorts of users to measure activity to understand what the impact of my programs is.

User Story 1:

I want to be able to [create|read|upload|delete] my own cohorts with the following parameters: Username Country Age Gender User Story 2:

I want to measure the following attributes Bytes Added Pages created ...

User Story 3:

I want my output to be available in JSON format.

Output of process

Epic, Main Stakeholder, Estimate (SML), Priority Speak to prioritization by epics initially, stories later

Stakeholder responsibilities 1:1 -- help break down Epics into User Stories Group -- prioritize costed Epics