"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story."
-Orson Welles
Stories are a critical element of Scrum and Agile development efforts. Each story in a sprint represents a piece of work that can be done within the sprint, whether the sprint is two weeks long or a month long. Work on a story is sometimes, depending on how your sprint team is organized, split into separate tasks. Well-written Scrum stories include who the user is, what the user wants, and why they want it. For example, "As a system administrator, I want a user admin role added so that a select group of people I specify can assist users with simple issues like resetting passwords."
There are three ways to create stories:
- Use the Application Navigator and go to SDLC (Scrum Process) > Stories > Create New.
- In a product, release, or sprint form, click New in the Stories related list.
- In the planning board, display the product backlog and click New.
Use the ServiceNow SDLC tool to organize and track your sprints, stories, and tasks. First, ensure that the correct users can work with stories. A user must have one of the following roles to create and edit stories:
- scrum_master
- scrum_product_owner
- scrum_sprint_planner
- scrum_story_creator
- scrum_team_member
After the user is assigned the proper role, they can create, edit and manage the stories and tasks for your team. Many companies and departments have a flow they like to follow when handling stories. If this is your first time or you are new to stories and working with a Scrum team, here are a few tips to use the tool effectively.
Tips for using stories effectively in the SDLC application:
- Fill in as many fields as possible. Sprint stories can be read by a variety of people in your organization, including development managers, scrum masters, product owners, developers, project managers, quality assurance engineers, and technical writers. All of these people are looking for complete information about the work being done. If you create sprint stories, filling in the story form accurately and completely can prevent a lot of people from bugging you with questions later, saving your time and your sanity.
- Obtain information from the right people when creating stories. Frequently, product owners write stories for their team. Product owners can, and probably should, obtain help from the Scrum team during story grooming or sprint planning meetings to complete certain fields on the story form, such as Points, Assigned to, and Blocked. The team will know what the work effort is (points), volunteer to take on stories (Assigned to), and tell the team if they have stopped work for any reason (Blocked).
- Split stories when necessary. If you create a story, discuss it with the team, and discover that the scope is larger than you thought, consider splitting the story into multiple stories. This makes it easier to assign and track the work.
- Create story tasks wisely. Not every team uses story tasks and that is fine. Only the team can decide if tracking work at the story level or the story task level is appropriate for them. One benefit of using story tasks is that it makes it easier to assign multiple people to a single story. If you have a rather large story, all of the tasks may be assigned to one person at the beginning of the sprint. If it looks like that person needs help toward the end of the sprint, the team can swarm on the story and different team members can pick up different tasks.
You can find more details about Scrum themes, epics, stories, and tasks in the product documentation.
As always, if you have a question on the Scrum process or would like to discuss aspects of the SDLC tool, the community is a great place to start.
- Jeffce and Rob Pickering both had questions about modifying the story and planning boards in SDLC. Unfortunately, it is not possible at this time.
- Mandy Kaur wanted to know how to manage business requirements in ServiceNow and Matt Dodd suggested using stories in the SDLC application.
Also, check out my last blog post on using the SDLC application to manage software development.
