Questions tagged [user-stories]

User stories are used with Agile software development methodologies as the basis for defining the functions a business system must provide, and to facilitate requirements management. It captures the 'who', 'what' and 'why' of a requirement in a simple, concise way, often limited in detail by what can be hand-written on a small paper notecard

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In Scrum, how to estimate research stories?

In our Scrum team, when there is uncertainty about a story or the team is not sure about how to implement it, we take up a research story first. Based on the findings of this research story, we are ...
Ashok Ramachandran's user avatar
5 votes
4 answers
2k views

Defect Found in Previous Iteration - Bug or New Work?

A previous answer stated that: On the other hand, if Feature Bar met the Definition of Done in a previous iteration, but bugs were later found after the feature was declared "done," then while you ...
Sarov's user avatar
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86 votes
7 answers
169k views

What is the weighting difference between Epic/Story/Task

I am slightly confused between the three. From my understanding: Epic - Create a web site (T shirt size) (L) Story - Create the Home page (1 point) Task - Create a button on the home page that is ...
bobo2000's user avatar
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12 votes
3 answers
4k views

In our Agile/Scrum team, should we move or split incomplete stories?

Our Agile/Scrum teams are getting better at taking on manageable workload and completing them fully. However, sometimes for a variety of good reasons, some of the stories are not fully done at the end ...
Ashok Ramachandran's user avatar
5 votes
4 answers
5k views

Agile "user story" for a user-less project

Disclaimer: I'm a total agile newbee. As a project manager for a pilot agile project, I am trying to create a rough sketch of my project using agile methodologies, but somehow I am not sure how to do ...
Lou's user avatar
  • 153
2 votes
1 answer
3k views

Does every Scrum story need to be completed at the end of the sprint?

I have worked on teams which, while using Scrum, have fallen either side of this opinion: every story must be complete by the end of the sprint. What is the "official" definition/requirement? I ...
Matt W's user avatar
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5 votes
4 answers
2k views

What can we do with a "mispointed" story in Scrum?

Is it OK to repoint the story at the beginning of the new sprint to reflect the size that we have now discovered it to be so our velocity is more accurate? On rare occasions, our team will work a ...
yellavon's user avatar
  • 151
2 votes
3 answers
1k views

How do I capture details in a user story?

Suppose I have a user story like: As a customer, I am able to browse products by specifying a category. If the Product Owner wishes to list the types of categories available such as books, ...
Extrakun's user avatar
  • 123
45 votes
15 answers
29k views

Should bugs be treated as stories or as tasks?

If you're using scrum you should know that there is a clear difference between tasks and stories. A story is something that is valuable to user. A task is a step to produce that value to user. So, ...
Vanuan's user avatar
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15 votes
3 answers
988 views

How to use Story Points, if User Stories are completely different?

Story Points (SP) is a good measurement, that allows estimating User Stories. SP (in my understanding, it's an important note) is convenient because it is relative and not related with time. All ...
Sergey Kudryavtsev's user avatar
12 votes
6 answers
991 views

Why use iterations in Scrum?

I am a Scrum Master in a 7 person team. We currently use one-week iterations for our sprints. I find that sprint planning overhead is huge (2 hours each week for entire team), and not nearly as ...
F.Z's user avatar
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10 votes
4 answers
2k views

Sizing an entire backlog using story points

I'm a PM on a large multi-year project with a sizable backlog of work implementing Scrum in 4 week release cycles. I hold weekly backlog grooming sessions with the project team and key business ...
KirMasAna's user avatar
  • 181
9 votes
8 answers
2k views

How to manage very small, easy tasks in Agile?

Let's say you have a bug on your website. Your developer needs to fix some CSS or something. He estimates it will take him one minute to fix. What is the best way to manage these kinds of tasks? Do ...
Jake Wilson's user avatar
5 votes
3 answers
2k views

Security Requirements and User Stories

How I should represent Security Requirements if I use User Stories? Should they be represented like special "evil" stories? or Should they be just "invisible" parts of user stories? I.e. if ...
Sergey Kudryavtsev's user avatar
4 votes
3 answers
348 views

How can user stories meet INVEST criteria in design-led development?

How should our team handle agile development when the development is pretty much steered by the final product designs, which were done in advance? In other words, how can we break down requirements ...
Paul's user avatar
  • 81
31 votes
2 answers
48k views

Why do Scrum user stories only use the Fibonacci series?

I know that user stories in Scrum are measured with a Modified Fibonacci sequence (0.5, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40...). Why does Scrum only use Fibonacci numbers to estimate stories?
Anoop's user avatar
  • 559
21 votes
9 answers
29k views

What is the difference between acceptance criteria and the definition of done?

I don't get what is the difference between both. They seem to be similar to me. For instance, I have this typical login/register User Story. Can you provide some DOD examples? As a user I want to ...
Ruslan Doronichev's user avatar
11 votes
7 answers
4k views

How to properly create story maps? (user stories)

I have a website that I need to build and want to properly create story maps. I am just learning how to do this so I would love a bit of help. My setup: Users: admins customers personal business ...
Cristian's user avatar
  • 249
9 votes
3 answers
12k views

How to estimate a project budget using story points?

Current workflow in our company: I create Given/When/Then scenarios or User stories Developers estimate Scenarios/User stories in hours, by giving minimum and maximum amount of time for 1 scenario/...
Ruslan Doronichev's user avatar
9 votes
3 answers
6k views

How to map user stories into tickets?

Currently in my workplace we use Redmine as our backlog management system. It works pretty well for us, but lately (as the company grew), I've been noticing that our tickets tend to be very long (both ...
Muc's user avatar
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7 votes
4 answers
4k views

How to write a summary for a user story?

I'm working hard on user stories and it is paying off, but something itches. We use Jira, but the problem is that from above the backlog seems clumsy. We need to write summary for user story so that ...
Siim Haas's user avatar
  • 348
6 votes
2 answers
12k views

How to write user stories for our UI development process?

First of all, let me apologize if I make some writing mistakes since english is not my native language. I'm currently working at a UX company as a front-end dev and I'm having some problems trying to ...
user avatar
6 votes
3 answers
2k views

To what framework do "User Stories" belong?

In my University of Applied Science we got taught that user stories are a part of Scrum, and when reading things on the internet it seems that everyone indeed uses User Stories when using Scrum. The ...
Bart's user avatar
  • 63
6 votes
3 answers
1k views

How does a team (new to product and domain) estimate user stories of a ten year old product?

I am the scrum master for one of the products in a software development company. Our team, including me, operates from India. However my product owner is in USA. We are working on the feature ...
ramu's user avatar
  • 671
5 votes
5 answers
297 views

How do we prevent debates over whether changes to user stories are new work or bugs?

I'm struggling to determine where capturing of user story elaborations and discussions fits into agile. A lot of what I have read and agree with is: You should be focusing on discussions with your ...
dreza's user avatar
  • 442
5 votes
2 answers
850 views

Requirements vs User stories

In this accepted answer (from Software Engineering StackExchange) to a question targeting my blocker, one can read: (...) think of user stories as a subset of requirements (...) It's quite ...
Tiago Martins Peres's user avatar
5 votes
2 answers
725 views

Should I specify user story acceptance criteria in Given/When/Then format or checklists?

As far as I understand Given/When/Then format of acceptance criteria is used when the project is going to follow BDD (Behavior Driven Development). Thus, the acceptance criteria will be used for the ...
Ruslan Doronichev's user avatar
5 votes
4 answers
468 views

How can we prevent business value from being dependent on multiple user stories in Scrum?

Our dev team keeps finding ourselves in a scenario where we have multiple stories, none of which actually provide usable value by themselves. In order to deliver any real world value, we need to ...
BadHorsie's user avatar
  • 213
5 votes
1 answer
2k views

Agile. Release planning. Why do I need stories instead of themes/epics

I'm reading Mike Cohn's book about Agile estimation. At the same time I have a release planning in couple of days. It's going to be 6 months (12 sprints release). We have the ideas about what needs ...
Ruslan's user avatar
  • 344
5 votes
4 answers
4k views

Story Points to Ideal Days

History I work within a IT Team for my business that delivers (Develops & Unit Tests, QA, UAT and Releases) either system improvements or new systems to different areas of our business. The team ...
garfbradaz's user avatar
5 votes
3 answers
786 views

How to handle confusion of "user stories" term in agile methodology?

I find myself in an non-agile environment where "user story" actually means "use case, backed by an excel requirements specification, a testing specification doc, and a few required wireframes || mock ...
DefyGravity's user avatar
4 votes
2 answers
3k views

How to get an Epic span multiple sprints?

While setting up my Jira's project, I struggle to make an Epic span multiple sprints. In other words, I expect an Epic (a complete feature) to be associated to multiple sprints. The idea is that I ...
Mik378's user avatar
  • 271
4 votes
4 answers
1k views

Thoughts on using user stories to define business/platform needs?

I'm very accustomed to user stories for end-user driven features. But if starting a project from scratch, does it make sense to treat the business owners as users and define their needs that way too? ...
Peter Bailey's user avatar
4 votes
7 answers
3k views

Is it ok to define a user story that has no real business value without another story?

I'm struggling to find the best way to use scrum and user stories on the following case: To explain the situation let's imagine we are developping Microsoft-Access. In microsoft access you can ...
Sebastien's user avatar
  • 151
4 votes
4 answers
945 views

Best measurable units for non cross-functional team estimation

I have a new development team and I want to use Story Points for high-level estimation. But I have two problems: My new team is not cross-functional (we are trying to solve this, but this is a slow ...
Sergey Kudryavtsev's user avatar
4 votes
4 answers
1k views

How to make user stories independent in multi-discipline teams

When there is a team which has multiple disciplines such as designers, artists and programmers. How should user stories be written to make them independent? Example: "As a user, I want a beautiful ...
Esa's user avatar
  • 173
3 votes
1 answer
437 views

Does spike failure cause sprint failure in Scrum?

I’ve read few articles about spikes in Scrum. In general there are recommendations to estimate spikes with story points and define acceptance criteria, pretty much as normal user stories. What is not ...
Kris's user avatar
  • 31
3 votes
4 answers
1k views

Scrum - Is a good practice to set the remaining work of a Sub-task?

I am working with TFS and I set the story points for all the user stories using the Fibonacci series and set the velocity of the team. TFS has a field called ´Remaining work´ for the sub-task, it is a ...
Sebastián A's user avatar
3 votes
2 answers
14k views

User story decomposition into frontend and backend

Let's consider the following and somewhat prototypical user story in one's backlog: As a user I want to be able to login to the application so that I can do all sorts of private stuff Now, this is ...
nourdine's user avatar
  • 511
3 votes
5 answers
2k views

How to refer to functional requirement specifications (FRS) from user stories?

Let's consider a simple story for a user authentication screen: As a user, I want to be able to login with my username and password so that I can do xyz. This looks good, but all of the ...
Achilles's user avatar
  • 191
2 votes
1 answer
126 views

Detect undiscovered user stories

Created user stories for a specific project but not sure if I'm missing to write down some that were hard to spot. In order to not cause (or reduce) development headaches, how can I detect previously ...
Tiago Martins Peres's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
2k views

How do you modify a delivered user story?

If you delivered a user story in a previous sprint and then need to make changes to that feature in the current sprint, what do you do? Examples: Change the user interface (UI) of a screen. Change a ...
Brenden's user avatar
  • 417
2 votes
4 answers
2k views

User story contains a design task that generates other tasks

I have some user stories that have little tasks on basic design with highest priority. This tasks will lead to a conversation about the basic design of the user story and will generate other tasks for ...
Notbad's user avatar
  • 121
2 votes
2 answers
632 views

Defining Story Independent Tasks in Scrum

I know that in Scrum this is the hierarchy for defining things to do: Theme -> Epic -> Story -> Tasks My question is. I got some tasks that I consider story-independent, for example, configuring ...
Luis Crespo's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
315 views

How handle small refactorings and minor code base improvements in Scrum?

How should be handle small improvements, should we include story for them in each sprint? Or should it be done outside of the sprint scope? I am talking here about things like Uncle Bob's boy scout ...
0lukasz0's user avatar
  • 265
2 votes
4 answers
3k views

Should I estimate repeating tasks (besides Stories and Bugs)?

Besides User Stories and Bugs (no estimation) we have some repeating Tasks in our sprint, which have not much insecurity and a clear scope. For example such a task is "releasing our plugin" (building, ...
ppasler's user avatar
  • 775
1 vote
3 answers
2k views

How can I manage both user stories and other non-backlog tasks if using VersionOne?

We are taking our first steps in agile and Scrum. We use VersionOne for managing our user stories and tasks. As the development manager, I am trying to build a sprint plan for the development team. ...
TaskTracker's user avatar
-1 votes
5 answers
176 views

Should user stories be estimated by efforts or by value it added?

I read this in an answer on SoftwareEngineering.se: Don't forget to distinguish between size and complexity in your estimating. You should estimate on size only, not complexity or difficulty. For ...
maverick's user avatar
  • 248