User Stories
A user story describes how a user employs the product from his own perspective. Product features are consisting of user stories.
A good user story uses the “INVEST” model:
Independent. Is individual without any dependency
Negotiable. Avoids too much detail; so that the team can adjust
Valuable. Provides value to the customer
Estimable. Has a certain scope with an end
Small. Doable in less than a week
Testable. Has a good acceptance criteria
The typical user story template has 3 parts:
The Title, The Description and The Acceptance / Satisfactory Criteria.
The Title:
A smart phrase to be associated with the specific story.
The Description:
As a [user role] I want to [goal] so I can [reason].
As an entrepreneur, I want to invite my co-founders to a cloud-based collaboration platform, so that I can work with them on real time basis.
Acceptance Criteria:
Allows you to define the conditions to be met in order to fulfill the story. They bring enrichment and make it testable. Moreover, they ensure that the story can be demoed or released to the users and other stakeholders. In general, add 3–5 acceptance criteria for each user story.
User stories are the smallest units of work. Since some of the user stories (i.e. epic) may be too large to be completed in a single iteration, we prefer to split them into multiple smaller ones.
Consider your personas when creating the user stories. User stories are the ways that personas interact with the product.
