July 9, 2018 — Posted by Al Shalloway
Which initial training you chose should therefore be that teams can do this after their initial training. The promoted belief that you should focus on the framework & then learn how to do this later is not just self-serving, it is wrong. While you can take a course and then pay for coaching after the workshop to learn this is not just expensive but wastes the time of your staff and often produces resistance.
Most Scrum courses teach story writing w/ "As a <user> I want <something> so that I get <value>". This is good in that it tells you what you want and why. But it is an insufficient structure to get to small stories in most cases. In any event, it does not provide a way to get to clear acceptance criteria. That has to be taught separately.
The most effective way of learning is doing on your own work. When people learn the core of acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) using behavior driven development's (BDD) Given-When-Then construct, they leave the workshop having written small stories from their own backlog. Most "doings" in workshops are games to instill why Agile is good. Most folks know that. The question is how do you do it.
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Al Shalloway is the founder and CEO of Net Objectives. With 45 years of experience, Al is an industry thought leader in Lean, Kanban, product portfolio management, Scrum and agile design. He helps companies transition to Lean and Agile methods enterprise-wide as well teaches courses in these areas.