User stories workshop with Parakey's dev team

As an agile organisation operating in a fast-moving industry, we at Parakey are driven to find new ways of working that develop and facilitate. Our development team works hard to further develop our products, always striving to take them to the next level. To empower and develop their work, the team has, among other things, a book circle where developers read and discuss a couple of enriching books a year, code katas (code challenges) are done every other Friday to hone skills, and last week a workshop was held that was planned and run by the team. 

The workshop was linked to the book "User Stories Applied" by Mike Cohn, which the team is currently reading in the book circle. The book focuses on information and tools on how to develop agile and build software that meets user needs using user stories.

To frame the discussion, the team used two exercises from the Hyper Island open toolbox: a collection of methods and activities based on the Hyper Island methodology that stimulate creativity and collaboration. The "Lightning Decision Jam" exercise focused on finding a clear and structured process for creative thinking that would help the team when making decisions, solving problems or discussing challenges together. The "Project Mid-way Evaluation" method was used to evaluate an ongoing project to discover any adjustments that need to be made in order for the team to work even more effectively as a group.

"An important part of the development team is to constantly evolve, both personally but also as a team. This workshop was an excellent initiative from the team to get a common view on how we work with user stories and planning. A great opportunity for us to apply the discussions we had during the book circle to practical actions to make our development process even better", says Parakey's Head of Engineering for Core, Emil Janitzek. 

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