As a user story, I want the respect I deserve so that I don’t develop an inferiority complex.

Oh the user story! You either love it or you hate it. You understand it or you are totally perplexed and frustrated by it. The must fundamental and core element of the Agile process is often misunderstood, under appreciated and misused.

The User Story, child of the Epic and parent to the Task, occasionally suffers from an identity crisis. Last month I happened upon a sad and lonely 8-point story who had only one 0.5 hour task linked to it. It confided in me that it was really a Task masquerading as a User Story but it was too ashamed to tell anyone.

The role and purpose of the user story can sometimes be misunderstood to the point of causing heated conversations and disagreements among Product Owners, Business Analysts and Scrum team members who are new to the Agile process. Here the Scrum Master’s coaching and facilitation of the Agile process is critical to the success and happiness of the team (and the user story).

As a user story, I want to define an incremental unit of work in the “who, what and why” format so that the scrum team can efficiently deliver the requirements by the end of the sprint.

As a user story, I want to represent a small piece of business value so that the Product Owner can see the iterative development of the work.

As a user story, I want to describe high-level requirements in such a way that  it sparks conversations among the scrum team members.

As a user story, I want to have detailed acceptance criteria so that the team knows the definition of done and exactly what is expected at the end of the sprint.

As a user story, I want to be groomed and refined on a regular basis so that I will be properly understood, stack ranked and sized by the scrum team.

As a user story, I want to meet the criteria of Bill Wake’s INVEST acronym so that I can be well formed and have high self-esteem.

Acceptance Criteria of this INVEST story:

• Independent
• Negotiable
• Valuable
• Estimable
• Scalable (small sized)
• Testable

As the author of this blog,  I want to share my thoughts and insights about user stories so that you learn in a fun and memorable way!