Writing good user stories in agile software development

For many software development teams striving towards agile, the idea of writing user stories can seem like another “thing” agile piles on top of their already busy workloads. However, the user story is valuable because it reframes the feature from the user’s perspective by describing the type of user as well as what they want and why.

[behnamrasooli]

The idea of User Story, according to Kent Beck, is to initiate a conversation between different parties so that they will have a common understanding of the thing that is being built. This is because having a chat with the person (not necessarily a customer) who is requesting the product/feature is far more effective in clarifying the real need than just writing down the requirements in a document. This technique is not replacing the requirements, Use Case Description or any other technique.

[matiasjl]

Thinking as a user. The key to success! Thanks for content

[jimiwikmanofficial]

That example would be a feature, not user story. User stories should be possible to complete within one sprint.

You would from this example have multiple user stories with acceptance criterias such as what fields the form should have, what should the email look like and how do we get that data into the email and so on. The payment provider itself would be a requirement with multiple features and stories.

Also, it should be mentioned that acceptance criterias are also legal agreements as they dictate what can and can not be an incident or defect as well as what has been agreed to be delivered. A defect without an accompanied requirement can legally be denied by the development team as an unspecified claim.

[christiankalala]

I so enjoy this short but insightful videos! Im looking forward to the next one on this subject