How To Create User Stories July 19, 2011
Gathering requirements for software development is a vital communication process. There are multiple parties involved and a project relies on customers, users, domain experts, and many others, each with their own view of how the system should function. We will look at how user stories can help us to gather the information we need for a successful project.
For a project to succeed, there needs to be a process in place that gets information as early and often as possible, where decision making happens based on information available at any point in time. Agile methodologies favour face-to-face communication and use user stories to collect customer requirements and to respond faster to constantly changing requirements. Use of user stories eliminates a need of extensive upfront requirements gathering and writing comprehensive documentation, allowing to us spread the decision making across the duration of the project.
What is a User Story?
In short, a user story is a chunk of functionality that is valuable to a user or a customer of the software. In my opinion the most comprehensive definition of a user story was provided by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler in Planning Extreme Programming:
"The story is the unit of functionality in an XP project. We demonstrate progress by delivering tested, integrated code that implements a story. A story should be understandable to customers and developers, testable, valuable to the customer, and small enough so that the programmers can build half a dozen in an iteration"
