In this chapter, we took a look at why the traditional requirements document doesn't lend itself well to adaptive planning techniques.

User Stories represent a much more human approach to gathering requirements because they focus on the need of the person we're writing software for and less on the technical outcome. They are deliberately designed to generate conversation with the people we are building software for, making the experience much more collaborative.

Defining discrete achievable outcomes for our customer gives us a platform for breaking down requirements into more manageable chunks so that we can deliver them incrementally. This enables us to prioritize work in a way that wasn't possible with the traditional requirements document. This makes the Product Backlog a much more dynamic set of user requirements. Part of the skill of the Product Owner is how they manage the backlog to get the best result from our business and our team.

In this chapter, we went through the different components of the User Story and what they each represent. In particular, we looked the User Story template and its three constituent parts: actor, action, and value. Many traditional requirements documents cater for the actor and the action but omit the value, despite the value element giving the requirements the necessary context and scope. Our Development Team can lose sight of why they're building this particular feature without it and, as a result, the work can take longer to complete.

We also showed you how to brainstorm a bunch of User Stories so that you could create a Product Backlog. The aim here is to start the conversation with your customer on what they want to build, rather than getting everything precisely right. That will come later with further conversation.

Finally, we introduced Agile estimating for User Stories, where we discussed the advantages of relative sizing over absolute sizing. We also looked at how to play Planning Poker, a team approach to estimation.

In the next chapter, we're going to look at how to get our team up-and-running using a Team Liftoff to set ourselves up for mission success.