What Is a User Story in Agile Methodology, and How Do You Write One?

User stories are extremely valuable to customer-centric teams, and they aren’t as complicated as they sound. With a little background knowledge, you can begin switching up your general task descriptions for user stories that allow your team to understand the immediate impact of their work.

What is a user story in agile methodology? If you find yourself pondering this question, along with who writes user stories, how, and what you need to know to get started, this article is for you.

What Is a User Story in Agile Methodology?

A user story is a way in which teams describe upcoming work from the perspective of their customers. While often associated with scrum, user stories first emerged through an agile framework called extreme programming and have since been adopted by teams across all agile methodologies.

The purpose of user stories is to highlight how a piece of work benefits the customer, whether satisfying a need, want, desire, or delight. By writing user stories, teams are empowered to identify how the work provides value to their customers, which makes it easier to collaboratively prioritize features, tasks, and projects based on customer needs.

When leveraging user stories within your team, Christina Hartikainen, director of learning at ICAgile, recommends keeping the three C’s in mind:

Card: the user story
Conversation: discussion with the team to create shared understanding around the story and how they might accomplish it
Confirmation: acceptance criteria for when the story is considered complete

Use Case vs. User Story

A use case and user story are often confused, but there are major differences between them. A user story is a short description of how a piece of work will directly benefit the customer and meet their needs, usually written in one to two sentences.

On the other hand, a use case is a long description of the multiple scenarios of how a customer will interact with a system, such as a website or app, detailing all possible paths a user may take. A use case has several sections and is significantly more lengthy and complex to write than a user story.

How to Write a User Story

We talked about the purpose of a user story, enabling teams to be customer-centric, and now it’s time to put that information into action. This section covers everything you need to know about how to write a user story so that your team can fill the backlog with cards that accurately represent value to your customers.

Who Writes User Stories?

The person(s) responsible for writing user stories vary widely depending on an organization's size and structure. In some cases, product owners and/or product managers may be responsible for writing user stories due to their complex understanding of the product journey. Because product owners are in charge of the product backlog and its grooming and prioritization, writing user stories is common for this role.

A different approach to user stories is giving all team members the ability to write their own. This strategy allows employees who are closest to the work to create stories, a strategy we harness within ICAgile to ensure user stories are accurate and aligned with current goals within each team.

There’s no right or wrong person to write user stories–what matters most is that they are being created and talked about among the team.

When to Write a User Story

User stories will need to be created on a rolling basis when new tasks, features, or improvements are added to the backlog or a current iteration. For teams working in sprints, top-priority user stories should be completed and updated before sprint planning for easy selection and prioritization. However, based on feedback, new user stories may be created during a sprint to accommodate changing priorities.

Target Audience Research

The main focal point of the user story is the emphasis on the customer. Discovering who your target audience is before writing a user story is crucial because user stories are written from the perspective of your user.

Building a persona or multiple personas that represent your customer(s) is a helpful tool for all teams and is usually a centerpiece in marketing efforts. By assigning a theoretical age, name, geographical location, job, values, pain points, and more to characterize target audiences, many people find it easier to step into the shoes of their customers.

What to Include in a User Story

Each organization and team may have a slightly different approach to user stories, but an effective user story includes the following elements:

Title
A description of the task’s purpose in the customer’s voice
Acceptance criteria
Priority
Collaboration and conversation should always follow the creation of a user story for further refinement user story refinement.

To understand how to put each of these components into practice, here’s a real example of a user story I created in our team project management platform:

Title: “Publish an article about user stories”

Description: “As a learner, I want to know how my team can write user stories so that our work aligns with our customer’s needs.”

Acceptance criteria:

“Article is published on public site”
“Article is scheduled for sharing on social media”

Priority: “Must”

Writing user stories gets easier and faster with time; however, it may be wise to store a user story template in Excel or your Google Drive to refer to as needed.

How to Create User Stories in Jira

Our team uses a platform called Jira to create and store our user stories. To build a user story in Jira, you need to create what they call an “issue.” Once the issue is created, you can add all of the components outlined above in the previous section.

For more information on creating user stories in Jira, read this article, which details everything you need to know about creating issues.

Conclusion

User stories power customer-centric teams. By combining target audience research and the user story best practices outlined in this article, your team can begin creating user stories that underscore your team’s mission to deliver value and high rates of customer satisfaction.

In our Agile Product Ownership certification course, we explore the art of writing user stories and how to prioritize them. Don’t worry, the class is offered at various times to work around your busy schedule.

See you in class!

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What Is a User Story in Agile Methodology, and How Do You Write One?

What Is a User Story in Agile Methodology?

Use Case vs. User Story