In this blog, we are going to cover everything about Scrum User Story, their introduction, why do agile team needs user stories, user story templates, 3C’s of scrum user stories, and much more.
User stories are part of an agile approach that helps shift the focus from writing about requirements to talking about them. All agile user stories include a written sentence or two and, more importantly, a series of conversations about the desired functionality.
What are Agile User Stories?
A user story or agile/ scrum user story is a tool that’s used in agile software development and product management for the representation of the smallest unit of work in the framework. It provides an informal, natural language description of a feature of the software or product from the end-user perspective.
The ‘end-user’ in this scenario doesn’t necessarily refer to external end-users in the conventional sense. They could be internal customers or colleagues within your organization that depend on your team’s output, and also provide the development team an understanding of the value of what they’re building and why they’re doing it. They’re usually recorded on index cards, post-it notes, or project management software.
In scrum, user stories are added to sprints and “burned down” over the duration of the sprint. It’s this work on user stories that help scrum teams get better at estimation and sprint planning, leading to more accurate forecasting and greater agility.
User stories are also the building blocks of larger agile frameworks like epics and initiatives. Epics are large work items broken down into a set of stories, and multiple epics comprise an initiative. These larger structures ensure that the day-to-day work of the development team (on stores) contributes to the organizational goals built into epics and initiatives.
Read: Agile Software Development Lifecycle
Why create User Stories?
Now you must be thinking that why don’t we directly break the big project into a series of steps and get started with it? Why do the developers need this added step?
Stories give the development team an important context & associate tasks with the value those tasks bring. Here are a few benefits of user stories:
1.) User Story helps to keep the focus on the user: User stories help the team focus on the small and immediate needs of the customer. This dramatically helps by providing early returns, reducing the investment of the organization, and significantly increasing the ROI.
2.) Enable Collaboration: With the end goal defined, the team can work together to decide how best to serve the user and meet that goal.
3.) Creative Solutions: Stories encourage the team to think critically and creatively about how to best solve for an end goal.
4.) Boosts Transparency: The index cards, post-it notes on which the user stories are written are visible to everyone. This enables an easier understanding, collaboration, and fast decision-making. And since everything is transparent to everyone, there’s a considerable reduction in the amount of risk the team encounters.
Read: Scrum Master Exam Questions and Answers 2022
User Story Template and examples
Agile user stories are usually simple sentences of the following structure:
“As a [role], I [want to], [so that].”
Here’s how each of the components in this sentence looks like:
- The role represents a human being that would be interacting with the system.
- The want to or action refers to the behavior of the system. This action is mostly unique for each user story.
- So that refers to the real word result or benefit, which is external to the system and is non-functional. It is possible for many stories to share the same benefit statement.
Consider the following points when writing a user story:
- Definition of “done” — The story is generally “done” when the user can complete the outlined task, but make sure to define what that is.
- Outline subtasks or tasks — Decide which specific steps need to be completed and who is responsible for each of them.
- User personas — For whom? If there are multiple end-users, consider making multiple stories.
- Ordered Steps — Write a story for each step in a larger process.
- Listen to feedback — Talk to your users and capture the problem or need in their words. No need to guess at stories when you can source them from your customers.
- Time — Time is a touchy subject. Many development teams avoid discussions of time altogether, relying instead on their estimation frameworks. Since stories should be completable in one sprint, stories that might take weeks or months to complete should be broken up into smaller stories or should be considered their own epic.
Once the user stories are clearly defined, make sure they are visible to the entire team.
Read: Scrum Roles, Artifacts & Events: Scrum Framework
Lifecycle of a User Story
The lifecycle typically consists of 4 main steep, which are described as:
1.) Pending
Here the user stories are found after communication between the user and the project team. These stories are in their most basic forms and do not have anything more than a small description of the user’s needs, all it does is act as a reminder of the need for further discussion regarding the user’s need.
2.) To-do
Based on discussions with stakeholders, user stories that need to be addressed in the coming weeks are decided and put into sprints. Detailed discussions take place later though.
3.) Discussion
At this stage, the end-user will confirm the requirements and define the acceptance criteria. With UX, wireframes or storyboards are used to show the end-user a preview of the feature.
4.) Developing
Once clarified, the development team will design and implement features that can fulfill user requirements. This process is again divided into 2 steps:
- Confirming: The end-user confirms the user story. To confirm the feature, they could be given access to a testing environment or an alpha version. Confirmation will be based on the acceptance criteria discussed earlier.
- Finished: At this stage, the user story is considered to be completed. If the user has a new requirement, regarding a new feature or an enhancement to the existing feature, a new user story would be created for the next iteration.
Read: Scrum Master Certification Day 5 Q/A Review
3C’s of User Story
These help to keep the purpose of the user story in perspective. Let’s have a look at each of the Cs.in scrum a user story consists of 3C’s
1.) Card
This is a placeholder that represents the user story in its raw form. It summarizes a detailed requirement; these details are still to be determined. The card has the following format: “who(role)”, “what(action)” and “why(benefits)”
2.) Conversation
This represents the discussion between the users, the team, the product owner, and other stakeholders to determine how the intent can be implemented. At this point, the card is adjusted based on understanding taken away from the conversation. Although usually verbal, it could also be supported by documentation and other automated tests
3.) Confirmation
This represents the conditions that need to be satisfied to determine whether the story fulfills the intent and some other more detailed requirements.
Epic vs User Story vs Tasks
Epic – It is something so large that it will almost certainly not fit into a sprint, is unclear in terms of client requirements, and should be split down into stories. Epics are often defined at the early stages of product road mapping and then broken into stories in the product backlog when additional information becomes available.
User Story – A story is anything actionable that can be fit into a sprint. These are INVEST criteria-based story points and definitions. By the end of an iteration, stories should give a vertical slice of functionality to the client that is both valuable and complete. Typically, stories are developed throughout the product development process, particularly prior to iteration planning and throughout higher-level product road mapping.
Task – They are the decomposed parts of a story that define how the story will be finished. If needed, tasks can be estimated by the hour. Tasks are typically defined by the individuals who execute the job, whereas stories and epics are typically developed by the customer. Because tasks are temporary, they are produced within the confines of an iteration.
Hope this article gives you a clear understanding of what user stories are, why they are important in Agile/Scrum and how to create a user story template.
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- Agile Software Development Lifecycle
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- Scrum Framework: Roles, Events & Artifacts
- Scrum Master vs Product Owner
- Scrum Master Certification Day 3 Q/A Review: Scrum Artifacts & User Stories
- Introduction To Sprint in Scrum & Its Uses
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