User Stories in Agile

When working on a products functionality one of the most important
aspects is the user story. A user story is used to describe just how a user or
customer will use the product. And as such it is often told from the user’s perspective.
If you need to focus on a particular functionality like searching for a product
or booking and appointment, a user story can be used for that as well. However
you should not be writing a user story if you don’t know who you are writing
for or what they want, so proper research if necessary before you can even
start with writing the user stories.

Personas are a great tool that can be used to capture the
possible insights of a client. A persona is a fictional character that consists
of a name, picture, certain characteristics, behavior and attitudes as well as
the goal the persona wants to achieve. A goal can also be a problem that needs
to be solved with the product.

One of the most important things to remember about user
stories is that they are not meant to be a specification but rather a collaboration
tool. They should not be used by the development team, but rather used to reduce
the amount of overhead and speed up delivery by keeping an only the relevant
information.

A benefit of user stories is that they are easy to
understand. This comes from them being kept simple and concise and not including
jargon or confusion and possibly ambiguous terms. One thing to note is there is
no one way to write user stories. Some teams will be more comfortable with a
certain technique, or some products, problems or stories will require different
techniques. Don’t be afraid to experiment and see what works for you and your
team.

If you are having difficulty with coming up with user
stories one way to get starting is to use epics. An epic is basically one big, overarching,
sketchy story. It is over time broken up into user stories, but it is a good
way to get a basic idea of what kind of features you want to include in a
product without having to commit to details just yet. Over time an epic will
also help to address what is most important to the client and the users and allows
you to write user stories based off those.

Once you have your epics and have started to refine them, it’s
time to break it into several smaller, but far more detailed user stories. Then
go over the user stories, adding detail to them and refining them until they
are clear and testable. By this point the entire development team should have a
grasp on what you are trying to do with each story and then break the story up
in necessary so it will fit within a sprint.

With the epics now broken up into the more manageable and
workable user stories, you should add acceptance criteria to help complement the
narrative. These will allow you to better describe what condition must be
fulfilled before the user story can be considered completed.

And important aspect of user stories is that they are collaborative,
along with most things in Agile. This means that you should not hide the
stories, but rather keep them visible so that everyone can benefit from them
and accelerate the progress of the project. This will help ensure that every
one is on the same page, as well as keeping work moving at a manageable pace.

Lastly an important thing to keep in mind is that while user
stories are important and valuable, they should not be the only thing you use. User
stories are most useful when describing product functionality, but there is so
much more to a product then just how or if it works. Therefore keep an eye out
for other things that can be useful to supplement the user stories and don’t be
afraid to experiment.