UNDERSTAND
Understand requirement, problem, users and context
Understand requirement, problem, users and context
This Agile technique describes a requirement from the perspective of a user, focusing on who needs something, what they need, and why they need it.
What is a User Story?
This technique breaks a large user story into smaller, more manageable stories while preserving user value and keeping each piece independently understandable.
What is User Story Splitting?
These define the conditions a requirement must meet to be considered complete and accepted by the customer or stakeholders.
What are Acceptance Criteria?
This relative estimation method uses a numerical scale to represent the overall size of a user story, considering factors such as effort, complexity, and uncertainty rather than time alone.
What are Story Points?
This technique creates an early, simplified version of a solution to explore an idea, gather feedback, and identify potential issues before investing in the final product.
What is a Prototype?
This technique visually arranges user activities and stories in the sequence of the user's journey, helping the team see the bigger picture, understand how the pieces fit together, and decide what to deliver first.
What is User Story Mapping.
This development approach delivers value through small, usable increments, allowing the team to progressively release and validate functionality rather than waiting for the entire feature to be completed.
What is Incremental Delivery?
This checklist or agreement helps the team determine whether a backlog item contains enough information and clarify to be brought into development.
What is the Definition of Ready?
This technique uses categories such as XS, S, M, L, and XL to quickly compare the relative size or effort of backlog items without assigning precise numbers.
What is T-Shirt Sizing?
This technique tests whether a proposed technical idea is feasible by building just enough to validate that the concept can actually work.
What is a Proof of Concept?
When a team identifies a problem but keeps asking "Why?" repeatedly to move beyond symptoms and uncover the underlying cause, they are using this technique.
What are the five Whys?
This development approach cuts through multiple technical layers to create a small, end-to-end piece of functionality that can provide user value on its own.
What is Vertical Slicing?
This acronym provides a set of characteristics for evaluating whether a user story is well-formed and ready to be worked on, with each letter representing a quality the user story should have.
What is INVEST?
In this collaborative estimation technique, team members independently select an estimate and reveal their choices together, then discuss differences before reaching a shared estimate.
What is Planning Poker?
When a team faces significant uncertainty about a requirement or technical approach, this technique allows them to investigate and learn before committing to the full implementation.
What is a Spike?
This technique creates a fictional but research-based representation of a target user, including characteristics, goals, behaviors, needs and pain points, so the team can better understand who they are building for.
What is a User Persona?
This development approach divides a requirement by technical layer - for example, separating UI, API, and database work - rather than delivering a complete user-facing capability in each slice.
What is Horizontal Slicing?
This format describes a requirement through concrete scenarios by defining the initial context, the action being performed, and the expected outcome, creating a clear and testable description of system behavior.
What are Given-When-Then (Gherkin) Scenarios?
This prioritization technique categorizes requirements according to their level of necessity, helping the team distinguish what is essential from what could be deferred.
What is MoSCoW?
When completing one backlog item depends on another team, system, component, or piece of work, this technique helps identify and understand those relationships so they can be addressed during planning and refinement
What is Dependency Analysis?
This technique encourages a team to generate as many ideas and possible solutions as possible, creating space for diverse perspectives before evaluating or narrowing down the options
What is Brainstorming?
There are policies, conditions or constraints that define how a business operates and determine what should happen in different situations.
What are Business Rules?
This development approach clarifies requirements by describing expected system behavior through concrete examples, helping business and technical teams build a shared understanding. It focuses on what the system should do, rather than how it should do it.
What is Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)?
This estimation approach compares backlog items against one another rather than estimating each item independently, helping the team determine their relative size, effort, and complexity.
What is Relative Estimation?
This tool helps a team assess and visualize risks by considering factors such as their likelihood and potential impact, making it easier to determine which risks need attention first.
What is a Risk Matrix?