Dojo for User Stories

[Ron Romero]

My employer is asking me if I can do a dojo-type thing to work with User Stories.  We've been focusing on the coding aspect of it in the Austin Code Dojo.  Is it possible to do something similar for user stories?  Or is that stretching the medium too much and I should just do a lecture, or a workshop that's not like a dojo?

Ideas?

Thanks,

Ron

[Matt Roberts]

Hi Ron:

 

A User Stories workshop is definitely on the list for AgileAustin in the somewhat near future--if you guys had significant interest, it would certainly bump the priority up.  I'm certainly not saying that this group can't or shouldn't do one too, just wanted to let you know.  I think it would be excellent to have this type of program in the code dojo as Developers seem to bear the brunt of malformed or missing User Stories and then have to deal with the ramifications.  If they can help create meaningful or at least understand what a meaningful User Story is and why it's important, that is only goodness!

 

All the best,

 

Matt Roberts

[Scott Stevens]

Hi Ron,

 

Long time no type!  I hope you're doing well.

 

It seems to me that the dojo style would be tough to implement for something like user stories since the focus of the dojo is for participants to take turns building on previous work, break/fix/repeat, whereas creating user stories is an exercise in translating user wants and needs into consumable work chunks for developers.  The workshop idea seems like it would work better, and you can still have hands-on activities where participants are activly engaged in writing stories. 

 

Hope that helps!

Scott

On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 10:39 AM, Ron Romero <zir...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Sukant Hajra]

Excerpts from Scott Stevens's message of 2011-11-17 16:53:54 -0600:

>
> It seems to me that the dojo style would be tough to implement for something
> like user stories since the focus of the dojo is for participants to take
> turns building on previous work, break/fix/repeat, whereas creating user
> stories is an exercise in translating user wants and needs into consumable
> work chunks for developers. The workshop idea seems like it would work
> better, and you can still have hands-on activities where participants are
> activly engaged in writing stories.

I'm really apprehensive of these kind of "practice" events with user stories.
The decomposition of work is /so/ deeply influenced by context, that good
pedagogy seems almost impossible.

Most of what I've seen has been bad instruction, with the problem oriented
around a pre-conceived solution (kind of how standardized test questions are
designed).

Open discussion and a focus on principles/values backed by real-world anecdotes
seems like a much better way to explore the subject.

With respect to code, though. . . I do think the good pedagogy is much more
within reach. Even the Genetic Algorithm problem has a lot of elements that I
see day-to-day in my professional job.

-Sukant