User Story - Creating User Stories

Creating User Stories

When the time has come for creating user stories, one of the developers (or the product owner in Scrum) gets together with a customer representative. The customer is responsible for formulating the user stories. The developer may use a series of questions to get the customer going, such as asking if some particular functionality is desired, but must be careful not to dominate the idea creation process.

As the customer conceives the user stories, they are written down on a note card (e.g. 3x5 inches or 8x13 cm) with a name and a description which the customer has formulated. If the developer and customer find that the user story is lacking in some way (too large, complicated, imprecise), it is rewritten until it is satisfactory often using the INVEST guidelines from the Scrum project management framework. However, it is stressed in Extreme Programming (XP) that user stories are not to be definite once they have been written down. Requirements tend to change during the development period, which is handled by not carving them in stone.

The traditional user story template was developed by a team at Connextra in 2001:

"As a , I want so that "

Mike Cohn, a well-known author on user stories, suggests that the "so that" clause is optional:

"As a , I want "

Chris Matts suggested that "hunting the value" was the first step in successfully delivering software, and proposed this alternative as part of Feature Injection:

"In order to as a , I want "

Another template based on the Five Ws is:

"As , I because ."

The portion of the user story should be started with "need" or "want" to differentiate between stories that must be fulfilled for proper software operation versus stories that improve the operation, but are not critical for correct behavior.

Read more about this topic:  User Story

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