A good user story tells you what’s motivating the user and what problem they want to solve.

In order to make an informal description that is actually easy to understand for both consumer and the creator, requires a proper system. Like this one below:

Hence we need a template that defines 3 things for the PM,

  • What to produce
  • How to produce
  • Whom to produce.

Once all three questions are answered it becomes easier to follow the framework.

Let’s take an example to understand it more precisely. As a registered user on a website, I want to change my password so that I can keep my account secure, or as a mobile app user, I want to save my data to the cloud so that I can access it from other devices.

In both the above statements you can see that all the 3 questions have been answered and a simple one-line story has been created which is as easy to understand very similar to a bedtime story from your elder ones.

Great User Stories always fit the INVEST set of criteria by Bill Wake, which means they should be

  1. Independent – which means a change to one user story would not impact the process overall
  2. Negotiable – which means the team can decide to implement it in any fashion without rigidity
  3. Valuable – each story should be able to deliver value to the end customer
  4. Estimable – it should be easy to determine the time taken to implement the story
  5. Small– it should go through the whole cycle (designing, coding, testing) during one sprint
  6. Testable – there should be clear acceptance criteria to check whether a User Story is implemented appropriately.
INVEST framework for User Stories

Once a story has been written, it’s time to integrate it into your workflow.

With this, we come to an end of this post. Hope you were able to understand how a template makes it easy to write a great User Story without any ado about making it complicated or fancy. Thanks for reading

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