Write Better User Stories

  Agile   Requirements Management   Scrum   ProjectsAtWork  

Writing effective user stories on Agile projects requires collaboration between the product owner and team. The effort involves agreeing on the depth of technical detail in the story, ensuring that epics are appropriately broken down, and adding acceptance criteria. Let’s look at some helpful examples for each step.

The third in a three-part excerpt from Chapter 5 of Introduction to Agile Methods  (Pearson/Addison-Wesley Professional, June 2014) by Sondra Ashmore and Kristin Runyan.

Agile has a firm distinction of the line between what the product owner owns and what the Scrum team owns. The product owner is responsible for ensuring that the company builds the right product (the What); the Scrum team is responsible for ensuring that the product is built correctly, or the right way (the How). The reality is that different teams will adopt different lines of delineation depending on what works best for them.

For example, a product owner who is particularly technical may include some design ideas in the user story. Like every other aspect of a good user story, the design ideas should be negotiable with the Scrum team, so the product owner should never dictate the design of a solution. Conversely, if the application is well known by the development team, then the user stories might be a bit more vague in their description, leaving a good deal of latitude…

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.