Update story template in project repo

[natalia-fitzgerald]

Task

We have now made changes to our work process. The purpose of this task will be to determine what we would like to include in the updated story template on the sbl-project board.

We can use this blank issue in sbl-project as our prototype:
cfpb/sbl-project#291

Checklist

• Decide on what should be included in the new template
• Implement the change in GitHub
• Manually update current open stories to incorporate this new approach

[dan-padgett]

To better understand the scope here, are we:

• Trying to update the entire project repo template, or
• Trying to update how UX work is captured in project repo tickets?

For the UX work, we also need to think about what level of detail goes into the project repo tickets vs the ones in this repo. For example, we could try adding "Review UX Research and Design Questions doc for relevant user insights" as a task for design work to ensure that we're using that information. That seems like it's specific enough to just be a part of tickets in this repo. But maybe we want a more general "Problem discovery and definition" task for the project repo tickets.

Also, where is our updated process documented? If it's not also in GH, we should consider adding a doc that outlines the process as we work through this ticket. Especially if we're going to capture tasks for tickets in both project repo tickets and ux repo tickets.

[natalia-fitzgerald]

@dan-padgett
The purpose of this story template update is to broadly capture the cross-discipline work that goes into tackling our user stories. We will be adding UX, Content, and Data task sections. The work of these disciplines was not previously represented in our story issue template. As a part of this story issue template update, we can also better define the UX design/research work that should be built into each story.

We still need to update our process documentation to reflect recent changes.

[dan-padgett]

Given that, I think there are a few things we might want to consider as checklist items for UX:

1. Define design problem: this is kind of similar to the "Write initial user story" item in 293 but might be more aimed at revising any initial user stories (or recommending that they don't fit an actual user need) and gathering any other information we need (from data, e.g.).
2. Design exploration: initial creation of mockups to solve the design problem
3. Review options with team and decide on solution approach: this would make review at the design/dev sync a gate for moving forward. Included here could be any revisions that need to happen.
4. Finalize design and update acceptance criteria to reflect desired UI behavior: I think this is a nice way to "handoff" design work since there's a good chance that we'll have discovered use cases or interaction requirements while working on a solution.

Within UX tickets, we could obviously get a bit more granular. For instance, making sure that we're accounting for any relevant research by looking at the UX research and design question tracker during step 2 and adding any new questions as a part of step 4.

@natalia-fitzgerald What do you think of those 4 steps as a general framework to start with for the user story template?

[natalia-fitzgerald]

@dan-padgett
Here's an image of the current template we're using.

The main sections are:

• Epic (the parent epic for the specific story)
• User story
• Acceptance criteria
• Technical tasks

In your post it sounds like you are getting at how we can further refine the UX part of the "Technical tasks" section. Currently under UX we have the following:

UX

• Write initial user story
  • Review against task analysis for accuracy and relevance (if applicable)
  • Map story issue to the task analysis (if applicable)
• Validate user story with the team
• Review for specificity and completeness
• UX tasks that link to the UX repo

Pass at applying what we discussed today

It seems as though a lot of what we've been discussing related to the backlog refinement process will pull a lot of items out of the UX section. Perhaps we may want to add a separate section called Story refinement or something like that. There we could track the progress that we discussed in this morning's meeting --- refinement ready, refinement in progress, refinement complete.

Epic

Epic issue includes overview, complete list of user stories, technical and content requirements, user testing task ideation, and current design mock-ups.

• Link to the parent epic issue

User story

• As a [user type], I want to [take some action], so that [reason for action].

Acceptance criteria

• Given [some context or conditions], when [the action that is performed], then [the expected observable outcome or behavior].

Story refinement stage

Put a checkmark next to the current refinement stage.

• Ideation
• Prepared
• In progress
• Complete

Tasks by discipline

Once story refinement is complete and the story has been brought into the current sprint, team members should create task issues in their respective discipline repos and add links to those tasks below.

UX

• Task (link)
• Task (link)

Front end

• Task (link)
• Task (link)

Back end

• Task (link)
• Task (link)

Data

• Task (link)
• Task (link)
  age

[angelcardoz]

Here is where we landed after working on the user story lifecycle, definition of ready, and definition of done. We will update the template to mirror the sections below.

Epic

Epic issue includes overview, complete list of user stories, user testing task ideation, and final design mock-ups.

• Link to the parent epic issue

User story

• As a [user type], I want to [take some action], so that [reason for action].

Acceptance criteria

• Given [some context or conditions], when [the action that is performed], then [the expected observable outcome or behavior].

Tasks

Team members should create task issues in their respective repos and add links to those tasks below.

UX

• Task (link)
• Task (link)

Data

• Task (link)
• Task (link)

Front end

• Task (link)
• Task (link)

Back end

• Task (link)
• Task (link)