User Stories

Before getting started with Epics, you need to learn about their base component: User Stories.

User Stories are an Agile way of conveying functional requirements in a way that the whole team is able to grasp. There are a number of advices on how to create a good User Story but the secret is to make them easy for everyone to understand, making sure the objectives are clearly written and that they are small enough in complexity so that they can be delivered within days rather than weeks.

They are the smallest unit of work in an agile framework. It’s an end goal, not a feature, expressed from the software user’s perspective. A user story is an informal, general explanation of a software feature written from the perspective of the end user or customer.

How to write a good user story:

Title

It has just enough text to identify the requirement, and to remind everyone what the story is. The card is a token representing the requirement. It usually follows this format:

“As a [persona], I [want to], [so that].”

Description

A complete and clear description of what is intended to achieve. Allows for anyone on the team to fully understand which steps are necessary to successfully complete and how those are expected to work. Any links to external documents such as screenshots, examples and design are welcome.

Conditions of satisfaction

An executable list of steps that must be done so that the user story meets its purpose. This list will help the team understand both progress and upcoming tasks. Once a user story is finished, it can be reviewed by making sure all these steps are indeed working as described.

Common mistake A common trap when writing user stories is describing them using feelings and expectations. It might be tempting to write that "As a user, I want it to be easy to login" or "As a user, I want to feel good using the app" but in reality this provides absolutely no information regarding how to make it easy. They're abstract concepts. The challenge for the ones writing a user story is exactly to describe the journey in a way they believe will be the most efficient. So, instead of asking for an "easy login" or a "good feeling", add conditions of satisfaction that describe what easy and good will look like.

Check some User Stories from other projects in Catalpa