A lot has been said and written about user stories and their role in an agile context. But what are people actually writing as user stories? It doesn’t matter if you are agile or traditional in your approach, poorly written requirements are one of the major causes of project failure. This is where the Business Analyst comes to the fore.

User Stories, designed to keep teams laser-focused on customer needs, serve as THE driving force behind delivering valuable, high quality features, fast. This presentation discusses how to write great agile software user stories by defining customer value and keeping teams laser-focused on needs.

Current user stories used to manage Agile requirements can be improved by clearly identifying, linking, and tracking Actors, Action, Results, and Tests. (A.A.R.T).

User stories are a technique taken from the agile development playbook that can easily be applied in traditional systems development and maintenance. User stories help you document needs in a structured way, from the users’ perspective. They’re a good basis for test cases, so as to support integrated requirements management and testing. In this article, you’ll find concrete advice based on our own experiences developing the requirements and testing tool ReQtest for how you can make user stories the basis for requirements management and testing.

Agile uses mostly user stories to capture requirements. In his blog post, Jean-Jacques Dubray explains that there is a problem with user stories because they tend to focus on the solution and not on the problem definition.

This short video presents the Mike Cohn’s Iceberg Analogy for User stories. It discusses User Stories and the Backlog, how you can perform grooming and rightsizing and how you should establish a grooming cadence for sprint, release and roadmap.

The common wisdom is that Agile register requirements using the user stories format: “”As a , I want <goal/desire> so that “. In this article, Earl Beede explains why user stories are not requirements.

A user story is a tool to describe the product functionality, but it is less useful suited to describe in detail the user interaction. Agile scenarios and storyboards are tools you need to describe the interaction steps. In his post, Roman Pichler what scenarios and storyboards are, how they can be used effectively in an Agile approach and how they relate to user stories.

A user story map is a technique created by Jeff Patton where you arranges you user stories into a useful model to help understand the functionality of the system. In this blog post, Steve Rogalsky explains how to create a user story map.

In this blog post, Jeffrey Davidson discusses the fact that a common issue for Scrum teams is that their user stories are too big. He explains that many teams ask for larger stories because they don’t know how to slice the work into smaller pieces. Writing smaller user stories will make your team happier and more productive. There are many reasons behind the need for small user stories.