Is there a technique to white boarding?

Whiteboard technique of gathering requirements in Agile projects is mainly used to put down all the business needs/thoughts at one place. Then pulling together thoughts and needs into requirements/features.

Out of features you can pull out user stories.

So if I am asked to do a whiteboard session. My questions/strategy will be in this fashion:

First of all get it clear who is who, like business, vendors, IT team, etc..

1. Ask the audience(Business) what are their expectations out of this meeting, just note it down.

2. Ask each individual from business their initial thoughts and needs for the initiative or the project. Even though you also know it, who knows you get any key points/drivers.

3. Relate all the similar thoughts/needs to make a set of features required.

4. Set the priorities for each feature.

5. Set the expectation on how the project needs to driven, what are the key drivers. What can be sacrificed in case of crisis. Is it quality, time, team satisfaction, money, user satisfaction.

6. Break down the features into user stories. I like them to divide with the help of designers, and my definition of user story is - Any function that can be individually tested. Finally come up with a product catalogue.

7. Formulate the groups and their responsibilities like Core team, Business team, users team. Core team should have all the people who are required to work together like designers, developers, testers, some business SMEs, some users, BAs, etc..

8. Plan points required for each user story, my fav poker card analysis.

9. Decide on the interation length

10. Decide on the velocity

11. Decide on the number of iterations and deployment strategy for the product catalogue.


Hope my answer helped.