The steps for this activity are part of XP iteration planning. In order for this activity to be successful, the following preconditions should be met:

• The customer understands the user stories very well.
• The customer has defined acceptance criteria for the stories.
• All team members that will be involved in developing the stories should be present.

The customer selects a list of user stories that he would like included in the next iteration. The stories typically come from the release plan but may also include new stories that were not originally planned. The customer explains the stories and the acceptance test criteria to the developers.

The developers discuss how to implement the story and break it down into engineering tasks. Tasks should include everything necessary to get the story to pass the customer's acceptance test.

The developers sign up for all the tasks. The developers put estimates only for the tasks they have personally signed up for.

If the sum of all the task estimates is greater than the sum of all the tasks done by the team during the last iteration, the customer must remove some work in order to respect the team's iteration velocity.