Writing Effective User Stories
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Try Udemy for Business- Translate business needs into well-structured User Stories
- Write User Stories that express the what and avoid the how
- Apply five simple rules for writing effective User Stories
- Clarify assumptions in user stories by adding context
- Identify and remove ambiguous and subjective terms and phrases in User Stories
- Select the appropriate format for expressing User Stories for Agile Projects
- Write stakeholder requirements in User Story format that solve business problems
- Elaborate User Stories to identify measurable non-functional requirements
- No technical background required
- Desire to define IT requirements in User Story format
- No additional materials are required
The Three Parts of a user Story: The Card, the Conversation, the Criteria
User Stories are a great method for expressing stakeholder requirements, whether your projects follow an Agile, Iterative, or a Waterfall methodology. They are the basis for developers to deliver a suitable information technology (IT) app or application.
In today’s parlance, a “complete” User Story has three primary components: the “Card”, the “Conversation”, and the “Criteria” often expressed as "Given-When-Then". Different roles are responsible for creating each component. The “Card” expresses a business need. Domain experts representing the user community are responsible for expressing the business need.
There is much to be written about both the “Conversation” and the “Criteria”, but neither component is dealt with in any detail in this course. For practical reasons, the “Card” is the User Story from the perspective of the user community. Since we created this course specifically to address the authors of the “Card”, we use the term “User Story” as a synonym throughout the course.
Well-structured User Stories express a single action to achieve a specific goal from the perspective of a single role. When writing User Stories, stakeholders knowledgeable about the role should focus on the business result that the IT solution will enable while leaving technology decisions up to the developers. Good User Stories are relevant to the project, unambiguous, and understandable to knowledge peers. The best user stories also contain crucial non-functional (quality) requirements, which are the best weapon in the war against unsatisfactory performance in IT solutions.
What You Will Get from this Course
A well-written User Story (“Card”) can drastically reduce the time needed for the “Conversation”. It reduces misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and false starts, thereby paving the way for faster delivery of working software. We chose to limit the content of this publication to the “User Story” as understood by the user community to keep the course focused and address the widest possible audience.
This 1-hour video course presents two common User Story structures to help the authors of the “Card” ensure that their User Stories have all the required components needed to express the true business need as succinctly as possible. It offers five simple rules to ensure that their user stories are the best that they can be. That, in turn, will reduce the amount of time needed in User Story elaboration and the “Conversation” with the developer(s).
- Product Owners
- Product and Project Managers
- Subject Matter Experts
- Business Process Users
- Business Process Managers
- Line Managers
- Business Analysts
- Anyone wearing the Business Analysis hat!
Learn the content of this course and assess its value to you.
User Stories are a great method for expressing stakeholder requirements for an IT solution. The first lecture is a general overview of User Stories.
Learning Objectives
- Understand Business, Stakeholder, Solution and Transition Requirements as identified by the IIBA(TM).
- List the components of a User Story
- Express Stakeholder Requirements in User Story format
- Realize who should be writing User Stories
- Recognize when to write use User Stories in the Software Development Life Cycle
- Discuss User Story Elaboration to identify functional and non-functional requirements
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The next 5 lectures unveil a series of five rules that will make your user stories more effective. If you apply these rules to your writing, over time they will become automatic allowing you to become more agile in producing them.
Given that, let's talk rules. Rule number 1, the focus of this lecture, addresses the sentence structure of a User Story. Well-structured User Stories express a single action to achieve a specific goal from the perspective of a single role. Trying to express too much in a User Story adds confusion and increases the amount of discussion needed for developers to understand what the story really means.
When writing user stories, stakeholders knowledgeable about the role should focus on the business result that the IT solution will enable while leaving technology decisions up to the developers. What can you as the author do to make your life and your developers’ lives easier? In a word, lots. Rule 2 in the series states, “An effective user story emphasizes ‘what’ should be done, not ‘how’ to do it.”
Questions answered in this chapter:
- How can you make sure that your user story expresses the what and not the how?
- Why is it important that you distinguish between what and how?
Good user stories are relevant to the project, unambiguous, and understandable to knowledge peers. As the author of User Stories, you need to focus on writing stories that the delivered solution will provide. Ensuring that your User Stories are relevant reduces the time wasted writing and elaborating unneeded User Stories.
Questions answered in this chapter:
- How can you decide whether a potential user story is relevant?
- Why is relevance important?
Ambiguity is communication's biggest threat. If your User Story contains ambiguous words or phrases, the solution may not be what you desire.
Questions answered in this chapter:
- How can you ensure that your audience understands your user story as you intend it?
- How does ambiguity affect the quality of the solution?
Non-functional requirements are your best weapon in the war against unsatisfactory performance in IT solutions. Whether you use User Stories or conventional requirements, non-functional requirements are king.
Questions answered in this chapter:
- How do you express non-functional (quality) requirements?
- What value do non-functional requirements add to your user stories?