Agile User Story Principles and its Benefits | The Complete Guide

What is a User Story?

User Story is a high-level definition of project requirements that involves enough information for the developer to estimate the effort required to implement it. It is one of the artefacts for Scrum Project Teams. Sometimes, it is also called a description of a feature. In Agile Development, we define a user story according to the priority of the feature moved to a particular sprint or iteration.

A sprint can last one week or two weeks. It's better not to make a sprint last more than two weeks. The vision behind User Story creation is Aligning Goals and constraints.

An iterative approach to create high value for the user, based on feedback and change. Click to explore about, Agile Thinking Benefits

Key principles of Agile User Story?

Agile Development is one of the buzzwords in the software development industry. The exciting thing is knowing precisely what It is. The answer is as follows: It's a different way of managing software development projects that empowers teams to make decisions, with software delivered in small iterations.

An agile user story involves high priority to Customer participation from the beginning of the development cycle so that the Product can be developed as per client requirements, and the Team goal is to deliver a product that is happy with at the end.

• Respond to change

• Working Product

• Great Team

• Delight the customer

What are the 3 C's in user stories?

The three C's of a user story are listed below:

• Card

  The user story card contains a concise description of the functionality of the particular feature.

• Conversation

  It happens Just in Time when the Team discusses the Story to get more details.

• Confirmation

  Test efforts that confirm a story's completion, which involves the actual definition of "Done." A process to check whether the system accepts the requirements of a user or not. Click to explore User Acceptance Testing

When are Agile User Stories Written?

User stories are written throughout the project. While planning the product backlog, the Development team participates and describes the functionality to be added during the 3—to 6-month cycle. One of the features is listed in the form of a card. The Team includes developers, Product managers, Testers, and Interaction Designers. The Team writes the features instead of the customer because the team better expresses the features and prioritizes them, which can be released earlier.

Mostly, stories are prioritized based on their value to the organization. Accordingly, the release is planned after every short interval of time. If one of Story does not fit in iteration, the best way to split it into smaller stories. The Team should follow a Test-driven development approach, which must be part of user story creation.

User Story - Key Takeaway/ Facts

• User Stories are not a specific task; they are always short descriptions of any independent product feature.

• It doesn't tell the developer how the feature works.

• It is not the final word in Development, as agile Development says welcomes change during Development.

• User Stories don't need to be independent; if feasible in one sprint, they can combine two or more features.

• User Stories neither have a specific format nor rules for writing them

• Also, the User Story is not shared with the customer sometimes.

User story checklist

• It must Be as short as possible.

• It should be Simple and easily understandable to the customer or end user.

• User Story Written as per user perspective.

• The Story must be created with an agenda: What's the reason behind a particular Story? The Value and benefit of the Story must be clear.

• It must derive one of the functionalities if it's larger and break it into small parts.

• Always follow Acceptance criteria.

Acceptance Criteria

Acceptance criteria define two things: at the start of development, test cases must be written first, and when closing any task, it should satisfy the definition of done demands. Acceptance criteria denote the conditions of satisfaction for the end user. It helps the team understand the value of a story and set expectations accordingly. It varies as per project and end-user demands.

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Acceptance Criteria Goals

• First, the Team should be clarified before starting Development on any task.

• We must ensure Team has a common understanding of the problem as well.

• Team members must know the deadline or when the Story is to get completed.

• The Team must verify a story via an automated Test.

Acceptance criteria should include

• Functional and Nonfunctional Use Case
• Best practices, Guidelines, and Performance concerns
• What a particular feature intends to do
• End-to-end flow
• User story impact on other features
• UI/ UX concerns must be kept in mind

Acceptance criteria should not include

It's already conveyed that the Team must clearly understand the definition of a done, i.e. unit/integrated tested, ready for acceptance test, deployed on the demo server, and releasable. So, acceptance criteria don't include the following things -

• Non-blocker or major issues

• The code review was done

• Performance testing performed

• Acceptance and functional testing done

A process to identify bugs and errors during software development and increase the quality of the product. Click to explore about, Test Driven Development

How to create an Agile User Story?

The Acceptance Test Provides essential criteria that can be used to determine if the Story is fully implemented. The steps to create agile user story facts are listed below:

Writing Stories

The first step is writing the User story. First, we should know the characteristics of a good user story, as there are no hard-coded rules for writing a user story.

• Independent: User Stories should be as separate as possible. Otherwise, it becomes difficult to prioritize the Story and give an estimation. If a customer wants one of the features to be implemented as a high priority but that is dependent on a low-priority feature, it becomes much more complicated.

• Negotiable: Requirements can't be drafted in the form of a user story, and a User story includes a short description of functionality, which can be negotiable during the conversation between the client and the development team.

• Estimable: It's essential to give a rough estimation for the user story assigned. If developers say it can't be estimated, then it involves the following reasons -

1. Developers lack domain and technical knowledge.
2. The Story is too big.

• Small: A user story must be as small as possible. We should break more considerable functionality into small chunks that are also easy to estimate, prioritize, and execute.

• Testable: The Story must be written to pass tests successfully. Here, the definition of the done concept is involved.

Gathering User story

• Start with Goal Stories

• Slice the Cake

• Put Constraints on Cards

• Write for One User

• Don't Number Story Cards

• Don't Forget the Purpose

Estimating and Planning

The team should be responsible for estimation, and they must give a rough estimate for their user story.

Planning a release set

First, it must be known when the customer would like to release, accordingly prioritize the user story, and put them in the iteration. So, Stories are prioritized by the customer but with input from the developers. There are many ways to prioritize in the form of first, second, third, or Highest, high, and medium, but the best way is to put numbers.

Planning an iteration

It's to be done by the Team, and the Team discusses each Story as per the feature prioritized by the customer, accordingly divides it among the Team, and gets the iteration started. Each developer from the team accepts responsibility for each task. There are no hard rules for particular task ranges, which can be 3 to 5 hours or 1 to 2 days as well, but it's better to spit into a checklist.

Measuring and monitoring Velocity

Estimation is mandatory to analyze the Velocity of task completion. Another way is to graph the stats in the form of estimated time and actually spent time.

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Design Thinking for an Agile User Story

Design Thinking revolves around three buzz words, i.e., When, How. What is Design Thinking? It's an approach to solving design problems by understanding users' needs and developing insights to address them. When Design Thing? Developing and deploying a solution to a problem How design thinking? Understand, Observe, Synthesize, Ideate, prototype, and Iterate.

• Understand the necessary knowledge so that the right question can be asked

• Gain Empathy with your target user by talking to and observing them

• Synthesize means coming up with a point of view statement that will inform your prototyping

• Ideate means, based on your point of view, generate many ideas as possible

• Prototype means realising your ideas and learning from people's reactions to your prototype.

• Iterate means revisiting your assumptions.

The problem is how to connect design thinking with Agile Development. The solution is User Story Mapping.

User Story Mapping

• We create a shared understanding among team members, whether it's design, engineering, product management, sales, or marketing.

• Teams themselves prioritize their most important work

• We can have a Visual representation of Product work

• Helps in generating user story

• Assists the Team to enforce their focus back and forth between the mission statement and the individual user stories; we can iteratively improve both in the process

Best Practices for Design Thinking and Agile User Thinking

The Best Practices for design thinking and agile user thinking are listed below:

• We should Invest in User Research
  Before starting anything, research must be conducted, and the entire team must be involved in understanding the end user. If research has already taken place, then start by testing some ideas. This helps the Team discover new problems that need to be solved and come up with a solution.
• The problem statement must be defined clearly
  Design Thinking should be part of Sprint 0, allowing the Team to understand the problem statement profoundly and create a robust solution.
• Build a productive team culture
  Delimit the team size and make a core team that includes a graphics designer, scrum master, developer, QA, and UX researcher. We should create a culture that promotes collaboration across departments, facilitating innovation, excellent ideas, and a successful design solution.
• Optimal Use of Design Thinking
  We should use design thinking at the first stage of project development or whenever a vital feature requires innovation.
• Design Patterns
  It helps reduce design and development times, and Design patterns work as building blocks, allowing teams to eliminate lower-level design decisions.
• Periodic Testing
  Testing must be enforced either once a week or once during the sprint. Regardless of the schedule, you should test before the design matures and the Code is finished.

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Benefits of Agile User Stories in Design and Development

• It becomes simple and easy to understand

• Allows the developer to implement user value

• Enable the project to be chunked into smaller pieces of features.

• Facilitates cooperative working with clients and users.

Ready and done? What's the big difference?

Definition of Ready

• The user Story has been defined along with acceptance criteria, and the Product Owner has approved the Story.

• The story must include either documentation, description, or use case.

• The Story has been sized as feasible as per the 2 weekly plan.

Definition of Done

• Unit test cases are written and pass when run

• Code commenting has been done

• Peer review, i.e., followed by best practices

• Tested by QA or functionality of modules has been tested by automation framework

• No Outstanding Bugs are there.

• Documentation was also accomplished for the module defined in the user story.

A Nutshell includes a code that meets the standard and tests achieved by the quality level. Each Story meets acceptance criteria, and Documentation is completed and approved.

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An Agile User Story Approach

The user story is fundamental to product or project design and helps us understand the purpose behind any work. Combining Design Thinking and Agile methodology results in innovation, productivity, and profits.

A combination of both is powerful and result-oriented if followed with best practices. To know more about Agile Methodology, we advise taking the following steps -

• Know more about The Role of Automated Testing in Agile Enterprise
• Get an Insight into Agile Analytics

Next Steps with Agile User Story

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