User Stories

A guide to creating and managing user stories

User stories are part of the Agile process. The agile development process consists of sprints. Each sprint delivers an increment of a product which represents “shippable product” – something that can actually be used by users. Each sprint delivers a number of user stories, which represent actual functionality with business value to the end user.

A user story emerges from a persona, which emerges from a use case.

A user story consists of

“as a [role], I want to do [task], so that I can achieve [goal]”.

User stories should be understandable by non-technical readers who know nothing about the system.

Implementation details should not appear in the user story and should be left to the developers.

The purpose of a user story is to describe how the system being developed will deliver business value to the end users.