Writing Effective User Stories
What you'll learn
- 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
Requirements
- No technical background required
- Desire to define IT requirements in User Story format
- No additional materials are required
Description
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).
Who this course is for:
- 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!
Course content
- Preview02:04
- Preview08:40
Instructor
![Tom and Angela Hathaway](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 64 64"%3E%3C/svg%3E){kind=avatar}
- 4.3 Instructor Rating
- 6,521 Reviews
- 49,517 Students
- 12 Courses
Angela and Tom Hathaway of BA-EXPERTS (previously Hathaway & Associates, Inc. and Requirements Solutions Group, LLC) have been in business analysis and UX (User Experience) design for over 30 years. Their expertise spans information technology, methodologies, and innumerable applications in every industry for organizations from Mom-and-Pop shops to Fortune 100 companies and government agencies. In their writings and lectures they strive for enlightening while entertaining.
They have taught many thousands of students around the world and facilitated hundreds of requirements discovery sessions under a variety of acronyms (JAD, ASAP, JADr, JRP, etc). In recent years, they have focused their attention on human-machine communication, in particular how to improve the use of Chatbots.
Current and past customers include TIAA-CREF (Financial), Cathay Pacific, Emirates Airlines (Transportation), Manitoba Telecom Services (Telecommunications), Honeywell (Manufacturing), Starwood Hotels and Resorts (Hospitality), numerous government agencies, and a myriad of other organizations.
Tom and Angela's training, consulting, and mentoring efforts have saved their customers around the world millions of dollars. They can help your organization evolve and improve your conversational user interface, business analysis, and UX Design practices.