INVEST Criteria
The INVEST criteria guides Scrum teams into coming up with good user stories, and it stands for the following:
Independent – Story is not redundant and provides enough detail as it is.
Negotiable – Story can be discussed and is eventually negotiated.
Valuable – Story is important to the customer.
Estimable – Story has an approximate range along which it can be estimated.
Small – Story fits within an iteration.
Testable – Story is clear enough to be tested.
Following the INVEST criteria helps the team practice exchanging feedback, estimating effort, and implementing features with sufficient understanding.
Epics
Epics are basically large user stories that are made up of smaller stories and aim to complete a certain user workflow. Each epic has a different goal that needs to be reached, and are too general to fully detail the work that needs to be done. Some features ideated while getting feedback from a customer may look simple at first. When these features are then planned for a Sprint and they turn out to be too big, they might actually be more appropriate to be listed as epics. It can also be suggested that when a group of five or more stories is seen to share a similar focus, an epic can be constructed to group these stories together.
Recommended Further Reading
The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course: