Welcome to "Defuse the Bomb"! Prove your mastery of User Stories

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Get ready for a challenge that will test your product thinking, team collaboration, and ability to turn needs into value. Knowing templates won’t be enough: you’ll need to write, refine, split, and prioritize user stories the way a professional would in real-world contexts.

The goal is to assess, in a balanced way, two facets of your User Stories competence:

Your theoretical knowledge: You’ll demonstrate that you understand the principles, language, and quality criteria that make a story truly useful.
Your practical application: You’ll face credible scenarios where you’ll rewrite stories, define verifiable acceptance criteria, perform story slicing, and make prioritization decisions with incomplete data and real dependencies.

Throughout the game, the questions will assess your mastery across these key areas:

User Stories Fundamentals & Language: Origin in XP and adoption in Scrum; stories as value hypotheses oriented to outcomes; Ron Jeffries’ 3Cs (Card, Conversation, Confirmation); classic pattern “As a [role], I want [goal], so that [benefit]” and the modern Job Stories alternative (when to use each); importance of User Personas.
Essential and Extended Information: Minimum fields (description, business value, relative estimate, and priority) and additional fields (acceptance criteria, dependencies, risks, NFRs such as performance/security/accessibility, DoR/DoD, links to metrics/OKRs).
Story Quality (INVEST): How to spot common smells (tasks disguised as stories, missing user/benefit, non-testable stories) and rewrite to meet Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable.
Prioritization and Estimation: Relative estimation (Planning Poker, Fibonacci/sizes), prioritization techniques (MoSCoW, simple ROI, WSJF), and an outcome impact focus (conversions, retention, efficiency, NPS).
Story Slicing (Splitting): Difference between horizontal and vertical slices; thin vertical slices that deliver end-to-end learning/value; practical slicing strategies (happy path first, input variants, business rules, data, progressive NFRs).
From Epics to Stories and Tasks: Taxonomy (theme/feature, epic, story, task), hypotheses and validation signals, and traceability/coherence with product objectives.

Some situations will ask you to identify a single correct action, while others will challenge you to combine several valid options to defuse the bomb. The key to success is critical thinking: choose the right format (User vs. Job Story), define clear acceptance criteria (Given/When/Then), split into vertical increments, and prioritize for early value and learning.

Good luck! It’s time to prove you can turn needs into real outcomes with high-quality user stories.

Defuse the bomb

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