User story

• 1998: Alistair Cockburn visited the Chrysler C3 project in Detroit and coined the phrase "A user story is a promise for a conversation."[3]
• 1999: Kent Beck published the first edition of the book Extreme Programming Explained, introducing Extreme Programming (XP),[4] and the usage of user stories in the planning game.
• 2001: Ron Jeffries proposed a "Three Cs" formula for user story creation:[5]
  • The Card (or often a post-it note) is a tangible physical token to hold the concepts;
  • The Conversation is between the stakeholders (customers, users, developers, testers, etc.). It is verbal and often supplemented by documentation;
  • The Confirmation ensures that the objectives of the conversation have been reached.

• 2001: The XP team at Connextra[6] in London devised the user story format and shared examples with others.
• 2004: Mike Cohn generalized the principles of user stories beyond the usage of cards in his book User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development[7] that is now considered the standard reference for the topic according to Martin Fowler.[8] Cohn names Rachel Davies as the inventor of user stories. While Davies was a team member at Connextra she credits the team as a whole with the invention.

• 2014: After a first article in 2005[9] and a blog post in 2008,[10] in 2014 Jeff Patton published the user-story mapping technique, which intends to improve with a systematic approach the identification of user stories and to structure the stories to give better visibility to their interdependence.[11]

User stories are written by or for users or customers to influence the functionality of the system being developed. In some teams, the product manager (or product owner in Scrum), is primarily responsible for formulating user stories and organizing them into a product backlog. In other teams, anyone can write a user story. User stories can be developed through discussion with stakeholders, based on personas or simply made up.

Screening Quiz (Epic Story)

As the HR manager, I want to create a screening quiz so that I can understand whether I want to send possible recruits to the functional manager.[17]

Quiz Recall

As a manager, I want to browse my existing quizzes so I can recall what I have in place and figure out if I can just reuse or update an existing quiz for the position I need now.[17]

Limited Backup

As a user, I can indicate folders not to backup so that my backup drive isn't filled up with things I don't need saved.[18]

As a central part of many agile development methodologies, such as in XP's planning game, user stories describe what may be built in the software project. User stories are prioritized by the customer (or the product owner in Scrum) to indicate which are most important for the system and will be broken down into tasks and estimated by the developers. One way of estimating is via a Fibonacci scale.

When user stories are about to be implemented, the developers should have the possibility to talk to the customer about it. The short stories may be difficult to interpret, may require some background knowledge or the requirements may have changed since the story was written.

User stories can be expanded to add detail based on these conversations. This can include notes, attachments and acceptance criteria.

There is no good evidence that using user stories increases software success or developer productivity. However, user stories facilitate sensemaking without undue problem structuring, which is linked to success.[20]

Limitations of user stories include:

• Scale-up problem: User stories written on small physical cards are hard to maintain, difficult to scale to large projects and troublesome for geographically distributed teams.
• Vague, informal and incomplete: User story cards are regarded as conversation starters. Being informal, they are open to many interpretations. Being brief, they do not state all of the details necessary to implement a feature. Stories are therefore inappropriate for reaching formal agreements or writing legal contracts.[21]
• Lack of non-functional requirements: User stories rarely include performance or non-functional requirement details, so non-functional tests (e.g. response time) may be overlooked.
• Don't necessarily represent how technology has to be built: Since user stories are often written from the business perspective, once a technical team begins to implement it may find that technical constraints require effort which may be broader than the scope of an individual story. Sometimes splitting stories into smaller ones can help resolve this. Other times, 'technical-only' stories are most appropriate. These 'technical-only' stories may be challenged by the business stakeholders as not delivering value which can be demonstrated to a customer/stakeholders.

In many contexts user stories are used and also summarized in groups for semantic and organizational reasons. The different usages depend on the point-of-view, e.g. either looking from a user perspective as product owner in relation to features or a company perspective in relation to task organization.

A story map in action, with epics on the top to structure stories

While some suggest to use 'epic' and 'theme' as labels for any thinkable kind of grouping of user stories, organization management tends to use it for strong structuring and uniting work loads. For instance, Jira seems to use a hierarchically organized to-do-list, in which they named the first level of to-do-tasks 'user-story', the second level 'epics' ( grouping of user stories ) and the third level 'initiatives' ( grouping of epics ). However, initiatives are not always present in product management development and just add another level of granularity. In Jira, 'themes' exist ( for tracking purposes ) that allow to cross-relate and group items of different parts of the fixed hierarchy.

[22] [23] In this usage, Jira, shifts the meaning of themes in an organization perspective: e.g how much time did we spent on developing theme "xyz". But another definition of themes is: a set of stories, epics, features etc for a user that forms a common semantic unit or goal. There is probably not a common definition because different approaches exist for different styles of product design and development. In this sense, some also suggest to not use any kind of hard groups and hierarchies. [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29]

Epic

Large stories or multiple user stories that are very closely related are summarized as epics. A common explanation of epics is also: a user story that is too big for a sprint.

Initiative

Multiple epics or stories grouped together hierarchically, mostly known from Jira.[30]

Theme

Multiple epics or stories grouped together by a common theme or semantic relationship.

User story mapping

A story map[31] organises user stories according to a narrative flow that presents the big picture of the product. The technique was developed by Jeff Patton from 2005 to 2014 to address the risk of projects flooded with very detailed user stories that distract from realizing the product's main objectives.

User story mapping[32] uses workshops with users to identify first the main business activities. Each of these main activities may involve several kind of users or personas.

The horizontal cross-cutting narrative line is then drawn by identifying the main tasks of the individual user involved in these business activities. The line is kept throughout the project. More detailed user stories are gathered and collected as usual with the user story practice. But each new user story is either inserted into the narrative flow or related vertically to a main tasks.

The horizontal axis corresponds to the coverage of the product objectives, and the vertical axis to the needs of the individual users.

In this way it becomes possible to describe even large systems without losing the big picture.

Story maps can easily provide a two-dimensional graphical visualization of the Product Backlog: At the top of the map are the headings under which stories are grouped, usually referred to as 'epics' (big coarse-grained user stories), 'themes' (collections of related user stories[33]) or 'activities'. These are identified by orienting at the user’s workflow or "the order you'd explain the behavior of the system". Vertically, below the epics, the actual story cards are allocated and ordered by priority. The first horizontal row is a "walking skeleton"[34] and below that represents increasing sophistication.[35]

A user journey map[36] intends to show the big picture but for a single user category. Its narrative line focuses on the chronology of phases and actions that a single user has to perform in order to achieve his or her objectives.

This allows to map the user experience beyond a set of user stories. Based on user feedback, the positive and negative emotions can be identified across the journey. Points of friction or unfulfilled needs can be identified on the map. This technique is used to improve the design of a product[37], allowing to engage users in participatory approaches.[38]

A use case has been described as "a generalized description of a set of interactions between the system and one or more actors, where an actor is either a user or another system."[39] While user stories and use cases have some similarities, there are several differences between them.

Kent Beck, Alistair Cockburn, Martin Fowler and others discussed this topic further on the c2.com wiki (the home of extreme programming).[41]

• Kanban board
• Persona (user experience)
• Scenario (computing)
• Use case

• Daniel H. Steinberg, Daniel W. Palmer, Extreme Software Engineering, Pearson Education, Inc., ISBN 0-13-047381-2.
• Mike Cohn, User Stories Applied, 2004, Addison Wesley, ISBN 0-321-20568-5.
• Mike Cohn, Agile Estimating and Planning, 2006, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-147941-5.
• Business Analyst Time
• Payton Consulting 'How user stories are different from IEEE requirements