Agile User Stories

Relevant Agile Principles

Working software is the primary measure of progress.
- Agile organizes and chunks of work into units that represent value to the user.
Our highest priority is to satisfy the user through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
- The challenge is to sort out what is extremely valuable from what is less important.
Simplicity: the art of maximizing the amount of work not done is essential.
- A key failure is building a product/feature that nobody wants.

To capture enough information about the idea of what the user needs without getting bogged down in the implementation details.
To make software features engaging and tangible for the development team.
To act as a Definition of Done in an agile framework.

Great User Stories always fit the INVEST set of criteria by Bill Wake:

Independent: they can be developed in any sequence and changes to one User Story don’t affect the others.
Negotiable: it’s up for the team to decide how to implement them; there is no rigidly fixed workflow.
Valuable: each User Story delivers a detached unit of value to end users.
Estimable: it’s quite easy to guess how much time the development of a User Story will take.
Small: it should go through the whole cycle (designing, coding, testing) during one sprint (usually 2-weeks).
Testable: there should be clear acceptance criteria to check whether a User Story is implemented appropriately.

As a

registered user

I want

to change my password

so that

my account won't get highjacked again.

As a

carless parent

I want

to find a nearby piano teacher

so that

I can walk my child to lessons.

As a

forum moderator

I want

a list of recently flagged comments

so that

I can drop the hammer on weirdos.

As a

Beltline metal head

I want

to scan a QR Code on a show poster

so that

I can add the show to my calendar.