What Does a User Story Include?
Only user stories that offer value should be created. Creating user stories give concrete goals and targets. Since user stories do not describe technical details, they can focus on product behavior. This allows teams to break features down and developers to work on them bit by bit. However, user stories that do not contribute to the overall worth of the product should be left out.
The best user stories are small and estimable. Features that are too large become vague and difficult to give work estimates on. By breaking these features down into smaller pieces, each individual piece is small enough to give an estimate of how many story points they will require. Where traditional development estimates tasks by hours, Agile gives story points. Story points do not indicate a definite amount of time but refer to general effort. User stories with more story points will require more effort than user stories with fewer story points. Assigning story points to a user story gives an indication of how large and complex that feature is. However, the user story should still be small enough that developers can finish it within a sprint.
User stories should be testable. Software development occasionally has a hard time determining whether something works. Changes such as adding new fields and other additions may not be directly testable. Several of these changes may be required for a new feature to work as intended. In these cases, the user story should refer to the functional changes that can be confirmed working. Several tasks in a user story can cover changes that will not affect functionality, but the user story itself should include some feature change that can be tested. A developers work may not always be testable, but these necessary changes should be grouped into a user story that is.
Recommended Further Reading
The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course: