During this past section, you learned all about Agile Web Development using the SCRUM approach and specifically how to create and manage User Stories with Pivotal Tracker. In this assignment, you'll get a chance to put that to use by setting up a project for an e-commerce application you'll actually build during our professional Flex or Immersive programs.

You will essentially be playing both the role of the Product Owner with a touch of developer: you'll need to think about what the user is trying to do and then—very roughly—how it might need be implemented.

The Viking Store Application

Your Viking warriors have been walking down to the local Smithy to purchase their weapons and armor for too long! It's about time there was some sort of e-commerce solution to meet their needs...

You've done your research and your warriors only have three critical goal paths:

1. View the store's inventory of axes.
2. Keep track of the axes they want to purchase using a shopping cart. Note: They don't need to create an account or anything.
3. Check out and pay for their shopping cart.

Your Assignment

Your assignment is to break down those high-level goals into user stories and add them to a Pivotal Tracker project. You will need to create a Pivotal Tracker account and a new (public) project, which is free. Follow the overall approach we talked about with agile stories:

1. Gather requirements — Think about what the goals above mean and what the users need. Use your judgement to define the scope of the project and what might be included in each iteration (so what are the major development arcs?).
2. Break down the project into stories — Specify the stories in the "As a... I want to... So I can..." format. Include acceptance criteria in each story that defines any edge cases you can think of which need to be covered by the story's developers (for this assignment, it's good to be more detailed than you might with a real user story, just so you get the practice thinking about the edge cases). Organize large groups of related stories into feature Epics (they can be tagged with the epic tag in Tracker).
3. Determine the points values for the stories — You don't need to go overboard because you probably don't know enough yet to make a very informed decision, but try to guess how difficult each of the stories might be. It'll be interesting to go back later and see if you were right.
4. Prioritize the stories — If you had to start developing this today with limited time and budget, what are the most critical stories to get done?

You'll get into the actual development work for this project in later assignments and during the VCS program. Once you've entered the stories into your Tracker, play around with the settings of tracker. For instance, locate the burndown chart and tweak the iteration velocity to see how many stories get pulled into the current iteration.

Now go write some stories!

Student Solutions

• Jonathan Popenuck's Solution
• Edmundo Rubio's Solution
• Allen Anderson's Solution
• Austin Smith's solution
• Gregory Alford's solution

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