The first thing you notice when you start using Agile is how user-centered it is and a good user story. Giving your end customers, stakeholders, and the business a real genuine value instead of merely coding and designing becomes the main focus. Agile User Stories are a crucial part of this philosophy that enables you to specify your product’s advantages for your target market and, eventually, how it will boost your KPIs and other metrics.
What is a user story?
One of the fundamental components of the Agile methodology is the user story. They are frequently mixed up with software requirements, which aren’t accurate. What exactly is a User Story? A good user story is a small—indeed, the smallest—piece of work that can be completed during a sprint and adds value for the user. This component’s primary goal is to center the discussion on end users and capture how the product functions from their perspective. As a result, builders have a greater awareness of what, who, and why they are creating.
A user story’s objective is to describe how a piece of work will provide the customer with a specific value. Keep in mind that “customers” don’t always have to be end users on the outside in the conventional sense; they might also be colleagues or internal customers within your company who depend on your team.
Tips for writing a good user story
Here are certain tips to write a good user story:
- Prioritize your users– As its name suggests, a user story describes how a customer or user employs the product; it is told from the user’s perspective. What’s more, user stories are particularly helpful to capture a specific functionality, such as searching for a product or making a booking. The following picture illustrates the relationship between the user, the story, and the product functionality, symbolized by the circle. If you don’t know who the users and customers are and why they would want to use the product, then you should not write any user stories
- Creating Stories Together- User stories are designed to be a simple method that lets you work quickly. They are a tool for collaboration rather than a specification. A development team should never receive a story. Instead, they ought to be a part of a dialogue in which the team and the product owner discuss the tales. This enables you to streamline operations, cut costs, and speed up delivery by simply collecting the necessary information. This strategy can be expanded upon by incorporating collaborative story writing into the process of refining your product backlog. Better user stories are produced as a result of utilizing the team’s creativity and expertise.
- Keep your tales brief and simple- Write your tales in a simple, straightforward manner. Keep them short and basic. Use active voice and stay away from vague and misleading terminology. Leave aside the rest and concentrate on what matters.Â
- Include acceptance standards– Always remember to include acceptance criteria when segmenting epics into shorter stories. Acceptance criteria are a useful addition to the narrative since they let you explain the requirements that must be met before the story can be considered complete. The requirements ensure that the story can be demonstrated or distributed to users and other stakeholders, they make it testable and enrich the tale.
Conclusion:
Good user story which are frequently expressed as persona + need + purpose, explain the why and what behind the day-to-day work of development team members. A seamless process depends on your team’s understanding of their role as the source of truth for what they are producing and why. Start by assessing the following or most urgent significant project (e.g., an epic). Break it down into more manageable user stories, then improve it with the development team. You’re prepared to start working once your stories are visible to the entire team in the open.
