Beyond User Stories: Managing Requirements by Business Need

The use of stories in agile projects is commonplace. However, teams in many organizations have discovered limitations in the user story's narrow view in complex projects. Attempts to coordinate related stories through "epics" and "themes" may help the details of managing the problem but generally leave the enterprise view unaddressed-particularly when multiple teams are working together. From his experiences on large agile projects, Alan Shalloway found that combining small pieces together to get a bigger view does not work as well as starting with the bigger view and segmenting it. With agile methods, you must go beyond stories and start with what is known as the "Minimally Releasable Feature" (MRF). The MRF creates the bigger picture of what constitutes business value and enables the management of small stories within this bigger picture. Thus, you get the best of both worlds-the efficiency of agile methods aligned with the needs of the enterprise. Alan helps you expand the typical use of stories to keep the bigger business needs in mind, while building the smaller pieces that the stories describe.