Request for Comments: User Stories and Scenarios

The ultimate goal in Mildred is to create services that are both useful and useable for its users. “Useful” in this context means something, which is needed and which makes one’s life at least somewhat (rather significantly) easier regarding handling and managing data. “Useable” and user experience will be a topic for another blog post, so let’s concentrate on the question how to make useful services.

When developing new software, modern organizations more and more often want to use so called agile methodologies. They promote incremental development of the product with close collaboration with customer; as the feedback is received constantly during the development process, the final product should meet customers’ real needs.

Among the several practices inside agile framework are user stories and roles. These are written in everyday language, and basically describe what task a user wants to achieve using the product. An example could be: “As an author of an article I want to publish my data set so that it can be found and citated by other researchers” or “As a researcher I want to find data sets published by other researchers so that I can make new observations combining the data sets”.

This is where we need you, dear future user of Mildred services! We have gathered some user stories based on the cases that our experts and data support group have solved during the years. Are they correct? Is something missing? Are some of them more important to you than others?

Read and comment directly here: https://wiki.helsinki.fi/display/Tutkimusdata/MILDRED+User+stories (requires authentication with UH or Haka credentials).

These user stories are used in most Mildred projects, so it’s uttermost important that they are a good presentations of your challenges. Unfortunately we cannot promise to fulfil all needs in the coming year, but the development will continue even after Mildred’s project phase is over.