10/08/2021 10 Tips for Writing Good User Stories

10 TIPS FOR WRITING

GOOD USER STORIES
Published on 24th March 2016
Last Updated on February 13, 2020

By Roman Pichler
Read all of Roman Pichler's articles

User stories are probably the most popular

agile technique to capture product
functionality: Working with user stories is easy.
But telling effective stories can be hard. The
following ten tips help you create good stories.

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1 Users Come First

As its name suggests, a user story describes how
a customer or user employs the product; it is told
from the user’s perspective. What’s more, user
stories are particularly helpful to capture a
specific functionality, such as, searching for a
product or making a booking. The following
picture illustrates the relationship between the
user, the story, and the product functionality
(symbolised by the circle).

If you don’t know who the users and customers

are and why they would want to use the product,
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then you should not write any user stories. Carry

out the necessary user research first, for
example, by observing and interviewing users.
Otherwise, you take the risk of writing speculative
stories that are based on beliefs and ideas—but
not on data and empirical evidence.

2 Use Personas to Discover the

Right Stories
A great technique to capture your insights about
the users and customers is working
with personas. Personas are fictional characters
that are based on first-hand knowledge of the
target group. They usually consist of a name and
a picture; relevant characteristics, behaviours,
and attitudes; and a goal. The goal is the benefit
the persona wants to achieve, or the problem the
character wants to see solved by using the
product.

But there is more to it: The persona goals help

you discover the right stories: Ask yourself what
functionality the product should provide to meet
the goals of the personas, as I explain in my
post From Personas to User Stories. You can
download a handy template to describe your
personas from romanpichler.com/tools/persona-
template.

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10/08/2021 10 Tips for Writing Good User Stories

3 Create Stories Collaboratively
User stories are intended as a lightweight
technique that allows you to move fast. They are
not a specification, but a collaboration tool.
Stories should never be handed off to
a development team. Instead, they
should be embedded in a conversation:
The product owner and the team should discuss
the stories together. This allows you to capture
only the minimum amount of information, reduce
overhead, and accelerate delivery.

You can take this approach further and write

stories collaboratively as part of your product
backlog grooming process. This leverages the
creativity and the knowledge of the team and
results in better user stories.

If you can’t involve the development team in the

user story work, then you should  consider using
another, more formal technique to capture the
product functionality, such as, use cases.

4 Keep your Stories Simple and

Concise
Write your stories so that they are easy to
understand. Keep them simple and concise.
Avoid confusing and ambiguous terms, and use
active voice. Focus on what’s important, and
l t th t Th
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10/08/2021 10 Tips for Writing Good User Stories
leave out the rest. The template below puts the
user or customer modelled as a persona into the
story and makes its benefit explicit. It is based
on by Rachel Davies’ popular template, but I
have replaced user rolewith persona name to
connect the story with the relevant persona.

As <persona> ,

I want <what?>

so that <why?>.

Use the template when it is helpful, but don’t feel

obliged to always apply it. Experiment with
different ways to write your stories to understand
what works best for you and your team.

5 Start with Epics

An epic is a big, sketchy, coarse-grained story.
It is typically broken into several user stories over
time—leveraging the user feedback on early
prototypes and product increments. You can think
of it as a headline and a placeholder for
more detailed stories.

Starting with epics allows you to sketch the

product functionality without committing to the
details. This is particularly helpful for describing
new products and features: It allows you to
capture the rough scope, and it buys you time to
learn more about how to best address the needs
of the users.

It also reduces the time and effort required to

integrate new insights. If you have many detailed
stories in the product backlog, then it’s often
tricky and time-consuming to relate feedback to
the appropriate items and it carries the risk
of introducing inconsistencies.

6 Refine the Stories until They

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6 Refine the Stories until They
are Ready
Break your epics into smaller, detailed
stories until they are ready: clear, feasible, and
testable. All development team members should
have a shared understanding of the story’s
meaning; the story should not be too big and
comfortably fit into a sprint; and there has to be
an effective way to determine if the story is done.

7 Add Acceptance Criteria

As you break epics into smaller stories,
remember to add acceptance criteria.
Acceptance criteria complement the narrative:
They allow you to describe the conditions that
have to be fulfilled so that the story is done. The
criteria enrich the story, they make it testable,
and they ensures that the story can be demoed
or released to the users and other stakeholders.
As a rule of thumb, I like to use three to five
acceptance criteria for detailed stories.

8 Use Paper Cards

User stories emerged in Extreme Programming
(XP), and the early XP literature talks about
story cards rather than user stories. There is a
simple reason: User stories were captured on
paper cards. This approach provides
three benefits: First, paper cards are cheap and
easy to use Second they facilitate collaboration:
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10/08/2021 10 Tips for Writing Good User Stories
easy to use. Second, they facilitate collaboration:
Every one can take a card and jot down an idea.
Third, cards can be easily grouped on the table or
wall to check for consistency and completeness
and to visualise dependencies.  Even if your
stories are stored electronically, it is worthwhile to
use paper cards when you write new stories.

9 Keep your Stories Visible and

Accessible
Stories want to communicate information.
Therefore don’t hide them on a network drive, the
corporate intranet jungle, or a licensed tool. Make
them visible, for instance, by putting them up on
the wall. This fosters collaboration, creates
transparency, and makes it obvious when you
add too many stories too quickly, as you will start
 running out of wall space. A handy tool to
discover, visualise, and manage your stories is
my Product Canvas shown below.

10 Don’t Solely Rely on User

Stories
Creating a great user experience (UX)
requires more than user stories. User stories are
helpful to capture product functionality, but they
are not well suited to describe the user
jo rne s and the is al design Therefore
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journeys and the visual design. Therefore
complement user stories with other techniques,
such as, story maps, workflow diagrams,
storyboards, sketches, and mockups.

Additionally, user stories are not good

capturing technical requirements. If you need to
communicate what an architectural element like a
component or service should do, then
write technical stories or—which is my preference
—use a modeling language like UML.

Finally, writing user stories is

worthwhile when you develop software that’s
likely to be reused. But if you want to quickly
create a throwaway prototype or mockup to
validate an idea, then writing stories may not be
necessary. Remember: User stories are not about
documenting requirements; they want to enable
you to move fast and develop software as quickly
as possible—not to impose any overhead.

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