User Stories
Explore the concept of user stories in Agile, understanding their simple format and advantages such as flexibility, conversation triggering, and compactness. Learn their benefits and limitations, and how they fit into managing requirements in Agile projects for better collaboration and adaptability.
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What are user stories?
User stories have their origin in Extreme Programming and have emerged as a holistic response to cumbersome techniques commonly used for capturing requirements in the mid-1990s. Projects in that era produced requirements in thick paper packages. The user story is exactly the opposite. It’s an extremely minimal record of the requirements.
A user story captures in a single sentence what an end-user wants to achieve with the software, both functional and non-functional requirements. In Extreme Programming, they were originally recorded on index cards by the customer, the well-known small cards with blue lines and a single double red line. The limited size of the index cards automatically made for a short and concise notation. The following format is used:
AS A [TYPE OF USER]
I WANT [SOME GOAL]
SO THAT [CHOOSE REASON]
Besides this simple format, more and more teams also define acceptance criteria and sometimes test cases. Some teams deviate from the standard, and sometimes, unfortunately, they even omit the “so that [choose ...