In software development and product management, a user story is an informal description in natural language of one or more functions of a software system. User Story examples are often written from the perspective of the end user or system user. They are often recorded on credentials, in Post-it notes, or in project management software. Depending on the project, user stories can be written by various stakeholders, including clients, managers, or members of the development team.
Explanation
User stories are a type of border object. They contribute to the development of meaning and communication, that is, they help development teams to systematize their understanding of the system and its context.
User Story examples are often confused with system requirements. A requirement is a formal description of a need; user history is an informal description of a function.
Creation
In 1998, Alistair Cockburn visited the Chrysler C3 project in Detroit and coined the phrase "User History is a promise to talk about."
With Extreme Programming (XP), user stories have become part of the planning game.
Requirements
How to compose a good user story? In 2001, Ron Jeffries proposed the Three C formula to create custom stories:
- A card (or often a note) is a tangible, solid physical token for storing concepts.
- The conversation is between interested parties (customers, users, developers, testers, etc.). It is oral and is often supplemented by documentation.
- Confirmation ensures that the objectives of the conversation have been achieved. It is written in the English manual User Story map examples and templates.
In some teams, the product manager (or product owner in Scrum) is primarily responsible for formulating user stories and organizing them into a product portfolio. In other teams, anyone can write a user story. User Story examples are written either for users, for or clients, to influence the functionality of the developed system. User stories can be developed through discussion with interested parties, based on persons or simply composed. This is written in the official How to do User Story mapping guide.
Methods
As a central part of many agile development methodologies, such as the XP planning game, user stories determine what needs to be built into a software project. User stories are prioritized by the client (or product owner in Scrum) to indicate which of them are most important to the system and will be broken down into tasks and evaluated by the developers. One of the methods of assessment is on the Fibonacci scale. This will truly be an example of a good user story!
When the user stories are implemented, developers should be able to talk about this with the customer. Short stories may be difficult to interpret, may require some basic knowledge, or requirements may have changed since the story was written.
At one point, one or more acceptance tests should be attached to each user story, allowing the developer to check when it is ready, and also allowing the customer to check it. Without a precise statement of requirements, lengthy non-constructive arguments may arise when a product is to be delivered.
Controversial Status
There is no convincing evidence that using user stories increases software success or developer productivity. However, user stories make it easier to find meaning without over-structuring the problems associated with success.
Limitations of user stories include:
- The problem of scaling.
- User stories written on small physical maps are difficult to maintain, difficult to scale for large projects, and problematic for geographically distributed teams.
- Unclear, informal and incomplete set of rules.
Communicative meaning
User stories are seen as the beginning of a conversation. Being informal, they are open to many interpretations. In short, they do not contain all the details necessary to implement a function. Therefore, stories are not suitable for concluding formal agreements or writing legal contracts.
Lack of non-functional requirements
User stories rarely include performance or non-functional requirements, so non-functional tests (such as response times) may be skipped.
In many contexts, user stories are used, which are also grouped for semantic and organizational reasons. Different uses depend on the point of view, for example, either from the point of view of the user as the owner of the product in relation to functions, or from the point of view of the company in relation to the organization of tasks.
Tags
While some are suggesting using epic and theme as labels for any conceivable type of user story grouping, organization management seeks to use them to structure and pool workloads. For example, Jira seems to use a hierarchically organized to-do list in which they named the first level of user-story tasks, the second level of epics (grouping of user stories) and the “initiatives” of the third level (grouping of epics). However, initiatives are not always present in product management development and simply add another level of detail. Jira has “themes” (for tracking purposes) that allow you to cross-link and group elements of different parts of a fixed hierarchy. In this use, Jira changes the meaning of the topic from the point of view of the organization: for example, how much time we spent on developing the xyz theme. But another definition of topics is a set of stories, epics, functions, etc. For a user who forms a common semantic unit or goal, there is probably no common definition, because there are different approaches for different styles of product design and development. In this sense, some also suggest not using any rigid groups and hierarchies.
Epic
Large stories or the stories of several users that are very closely related are summarized as epic. The epic’s general explanation is a user story that is too big for a sprint.
Many epics or stories grouped hierarchically are mostly known from Jira.
User Story map: description
The story map is a graphical two-dimensional visualization of the backlog of the product. At the top of the map are headings under which the stories are grouped, commonly called “epics” (large rough user stories), “themes” (collections of related user stories), or “actions”. They are determined by focusing on the user's workflow or "in the order in which you would explain the behavior of the system." Vertically, below the epic, actual examples of the User Story map are arranged and sorted by priority. The first horizontal row is a “walking skeleton” and lower, which represents a growing sophistication.
Thus, it becomes possible to describe even large systems without losing the overall picture. User Story map reviews written by users come down to the interactivity and fun of this activity, which is very pleasing to people. They claim the benefits of such software. First of all, it is that they facilitate the assessment of tasks.
User Story examples are part of a flexible approach that helps shift the focus from writing requirements to discussing them. All flexible user stories include one or two written sentences and, more importantly, a series of conversations about the desired functionality.
Template
What about the User Story map examples? User stories are short, simple descriptions of functions told from the point of view of a person who wants a new opportunity. This is usually a user or client of the system. They usually follow a simple pattern:
As <user type>, I want <some target> because <reason>.
This is the answer to the question of how to build a User Story mapping story map. User stories are often written on cards or notes, stored in a shoe box, and placed on walls or tables to facilitate planning and discussion. As such, they greatly shift the emphasis from writing functions to discussing them. In fact, these discussions are more important than any written text. And for the latter, you can use the user stories sample written above.
Benefits
One of the advantages of flexible user stories is that they can be written with varying degrees of detail. We can write a user story to cover a large number of functionality. These great user stories are commonly known as epic. Here's an example of an epic flexible user story from a product for backing up to a computer.
As a user, you can back up my entire hard drive. Since the epic is usually too large for a flexible team to complete in one iteration, it breaks up into several small user stories before it continues. The epic cited above can be broken down into dozens (or perhaps hundreds).
As an experienced user, you can specify the files or folders to back up based on file size, creation date, and modification date. As a user, a person can specify folders that cannot be backed up so that the backup disk is not filled with things that he does not need to save. How is detail added to user stories? Details can be added in two ways:
- Dividing the user story into several small ones.
- Adding "satisfaction conditions".
When a relatively large story breaks into several small, flexible user stories, it is natural to assume that details have been added. In the end, more was written.
Satisfaction Terms
This is just a high-level acceptance test that will be valid after the completion of a flexible user story. Consider the following as another example of a flexible user story:
- As vice president of marketing, I want to choose the vacation season that will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of past advertising campaigns so that I can determine the profitable ones.
You can add details to this user story example by adding the following satisfaction conditions:
- Make sure that it works with the main retail holidays: Christmas, Easter, President's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Labor Day, New Year.
- Support for holidays that span two calendar years (none span three).
- Holiday seasons can be set from one holiday to another (e.g., Thanksgiving for Christmas).
- Holiday seasons can be set a few days before the holiday.
Anyone can write user stories. The product owner must make sure that there are many incomplete user stories, but this does not mean that the author is the owner of the product. For a good flexible project, you should expect each user to have examples of user stories.
Also note that the one who writes the user's story is much less important than the one who participates in its discussion.
Importance for Projects
User stories are written throughout the agile project. Usually a story writing workshop is held at the beginning. Everyone in the team participates with the goal of creating a product expectation journal that fully describes the functionality that will be added during the project or within three to six months of release in it. Examples of this are in the large collection of Example User Story map.
Some of these flexible user stories will undoubtedly be epic. Later, the epics will be decomposed into smaller stories that will more readily fit into one iteration. In addition, new stories can be written and added to the product portfolio at any time and by anyone.
Agile projects, especially Scrum, use the product backlog, which is a priority list of functionality that will be developed in the product or service. Although items in progress may be what the team wants, user stories have become the best and most popular form of work in progress.
While the backlog of the product can be considered as a substitute for the requirements document of a traditional project, it is important to remember that the written part of the flexible user story (“As a user, I want ...”) is incomplete until discussions about this story occur. It is written in the American manual User Story mapping and how to use it.
Often it is better to consider the written part as a pointer to a real requirement. User stories can point to a diagram depicting a workflow, a spreadsheet showing how to perform calculations, or any other artifact that the product owner or team desires.