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How to write a good user story?
Introduction
As a developer I would like to always work on well-defined stories with unambiguous goals and all required details to code the feature or do the change. As I didn't find any complete guide to write user stories showing examples, I decided to write my own check list.
Definition of Ready for user stories to enter the sprint backlog
When I first wrote this, I wanted to list all conditions which must be met to pull a backlog item into a sprint. If any condition isn't fulfilled, the backlog item shouldn't be included in the sprint. There some risks on this approach, so I currently prefer to establish a process to improve the user stories more than to create a guard mechanism.
Mandatory
- Title with the goal of the story
- Narrative description of the goal of the story
- The business value is described (Valuable)
- It is usually related to strategic goals and may take into account other stories
- Acceptance criteria for the testing team (Testable)
- They describe exactly what fields are seen, changed or used
- They clearly indicate how to test the feature
- Detailed description of what is required
- Including where do the data come from
- Including what fields are used, read or written
- Including how the fields are shown
- Separate Section Scope including what isn't included in the story
- Open Questions section for the developers to ask questions before the backlog grooming meeting
- No external dependencies blocking the item from being completed (Independent)
- It is good to link the story with the predecessors and next stories
- The size was estimated can be completed in one sprint (Small)
- The estimation was done in the backlog grooming by the product owner and some developers
- The story is prioritized compared to other stories in the product backlog
- The development team has all required details to evaluate if the story can be finished fulfilling the definition of done in a sprint (Estimable)
- Questions may always arouse during the sprint, this is expected. But it must be less frequent as the teams and the product owner learn about the business
- The development team knows how to demo the story
Optional
- If the story involves changes in the frontend, the CSS, Javascript and HTML Code with the design is available
- In projects were other team is responsible for the UI, you have to relax this requirement. Sometimes developers have to provide the design.
- Performance criteria, if any, are defined and testable
- Internationalization: How are the fields, frontend or API works on different languages and countries?
Discussion