User Story

User centered design (UCD), puts actual end users at the center of the conversation. The User Story is the core component and provides the critical connection between the needs of the user and the solution. They are short, simple descriptions of a feature written from the perspective of a person who needs or wants the new capability. They are written in non-technical language and, after reading one, the whole team should understand why they are building what they're building and what value it creates.

User stories are the smallest unit of work in an agile framework and are the building blocks of larger frameworks called Epics. Epics are generally larger pieces of work that cannot be completed in one iteration or sprint cycle. These epics are br

Groups of epics that comprise a given theme in the development cycle are often referred to as Initiatives.

A user story follows a consistent structure so that all teams are clear on what to do. The structure is typically the following:

As a [customer type], I want [some goal] so that [some reason].

Process

At the beginning of on of our agile projects, there is often a story-writing workshop. All members of the team participate in this effort to begin to understand the project and it component functionality. The goal is to create a backlog that completely describes the functionality as be know it from the beginning, knowing that changes will be made through our regular cycle of testing and feedback.

The outcomes from this initial workshop tends to be both user stories and epics. Later, the epics will be decomposed into constituent user stories that can be tackled more effectively. As the project progresses, new stories can be written and added to the product backlog and, sometimes existing user stories are changed or closed based on user feedback..