The Training Day is back! The @SoCraTes_UK ‘26 unconference is in the UK near London from June 18th (links in thread), and we’re excited to announce we will be joined by Gemma Cameron, with her session “Hands-on: Bringing User Stories to Life”.
The hardest thing about software development is sharing ideas and understanding your users. What are we making, who is it for, what problems do they currently have, how can we fix them, how will they feel? What could go wrong for them?
User stories have become boring tasks written in gherkin syntax. How can the ideas and feelings be shared in such a simple way that even your family and friends will understand your product and its benefits? How can you understand the context the user is operating in? How can you build a system for them that helps rather than hinders in their workflow? How can you plan your system for when things go wrong?
We've got a fun thing for you to try in this workshop: Comics!
Bring a few of your own users' stories and we’ll bring them to life in a very short amount of time, with no drawing skills required!
Gemma Cameron is a tech and business consultant, software developer, and experienced speaker based in Manchester. She has been an active member of the UK tech community for over a decade, speaking at conferences including SPAConf, Agile Manchester and DDD Europe.
Gemma's work focuses on bridging the gap between business and engineering teams, with a particular interest in people, ways of working, and making complex ideas practical and usable. Alongside her consulting work, she writes about engineering culture, hiring, and team development on https://rubygem.blog
If that doesn't interest you, she has a whole cheese joke routine and a wealth of ferret facts.
And that’s not all! Here’s the full programme (more: https://socratesuk.org/training_day.html):
* @emilybache - Controlling Legacy Code with Approval Tests
* @lisihocke - Secure development lifecycle
* Gemma Cameron - Bringing User Stories to Life (@ruby_gem)
* @claresudbery - Using TDD to get Better Results from LLMs/AI
* Jon Jagger - TDD with Cyber-dojo
* Duncan McGregor & @natpryce - Extreme Refactoring
* Tim Ottinger - Value Stream Mapping (@tottinge)
SoCraTes UK