Isabel Evans

Independent Consultant

For all the products we build, test and deliver, a good – great – user experience is vital to the success of our projects and organisations. We need to understand what a great experience is for our users. We need to understand quality and what it means for them.

One tool to help us is the “user story” used to capture what is required and test whether we have delivered it. But, could we enrich these stories to help provide not just the required functionality but a beautiful user experience? We employ user stories in IT projects to help us understand what our customers want, and to test whether we have delivered it to them. But do we use them to their full potential?

We need to listen to stories and to tell stories, as this is a powerful way to understand ourselves and others. This webinar explores the power of stories, and how we can harness that in projects.

Stories are fundamental to our understanding of the world, both within and outside the IT context. Humans use them to encapsulate lessons for life, introduce new concepts, pass on wisdom, remember lessons, cause change and explain how they feel. In an IT world where understanding the user experience is becoming of increasing importance, we are becoming more involved in story telling – at planning meetings, at retrospectives, when reporting issued during testing and when understanding the user’s stories.

In preparation for her workshop at EuroSTAR, Isabel reflects on the potential power of stories to influence people and the projects they work on. Isabel shares how to enrich the user story concept in order to learn more about our customers, and how to harness them to aid communication within projects. Join her at the webinar to learn why stories are important for testers and how to use them both to give information to others and in listening to their point of view. Join her at EuroSTAR to practise improving your testing story-telling and story-listening.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn why stories are fundamentally important to our testing world
• Understand why actively engaging in telling and listening to stories will improve our projects
• Understand why enriching user stories helps us deliver a beautiful user experience