Project Scope and Stories

User Story Outline:

At a high level a user story should contain and explain the following:

• As a [type of user]
• I want [an action]
• So that [a benefit/value]

Our user stories should put the user at the center of the conversation so that we can discuss what to add or change to the designated software product.

What Makes a Good User Story?

INVEST:

• Independent: User stories should be independent of each other so you can freely move them around your product backlog as priorities shift.
• Negotiable: Lay down the details of a user story in collaboration between your customer and the team that’ll implement it. This collaboration includes negotiating the scope: what the implementation will and won’t include.
• Valuable: A good user story has value to the customer (which may be an internal user). Without that value, there’s no point in putting any effort into the story.
• Estimable: If you can’t estimate a story, it means you don’t yet understand the scope well enough, or the scope is too big to estimate easily. You don’t need exact estimates, but when you can estimate a story it’s also more negotiable. Plus you’ll be able to differentiate between valuable low effort and not so valuable high effort stories.
• Small: You want the effort to implement a user story to be small. At most a few weeks (by one person), though many teams use ‘a few days’ as their limit. Smaller stories are easier to estimate. Big stories are harder to estimate, and thus less negotiable.
• Testable: If your customer, in collaboration with and helped by the implementing team, can’t tell you how to verify you’ve implemented what s/he wants, you haven’t created enough clarity about the story yet. Writing down the acceptance criteria, also known as specification by example in BDD, before implementing the story, makes a team more productive by avoiding rework as a result of misunderstandings.

More Story Information

There is additional information that should be reviewed about the different types of tickets on this page.

Related

• Estimation — estimate fidelity and quoting rules