How to Write User Stories in Agile: The 03 C’s and Examples

A user story happens to be the smallest unit of an agile framework. User stories are not the features of the agile framework. They can more aptly be called the end goals of the framework from the user’s perspective.

An agile user story aims to render information on the benefit of a piece of work. The term “customers” includes both current users and potential future users in the agile user story. The developers produce agile user stories using scrum or kanban. Find details on these two techniques for producing user stories below.

Scrum: The technique of developing user stories involves adding the stories to the sprints. The sprint will burn down the story in a systematic manner.

Kanban: This is a more popular technique for creating user stories. Typically, the teams keep the user stories in the backlog and run them through the workflow.

The user stories in Agile act as the building blocks in a larger agile framework. For example, epics and initiatives are the larger agile frameworks that deploy user stories as building blocks.

The Three C’s of User Stories

A developer team keeps adding user stories to the software to make it user-friendly. Nevertheless, user stories give users detailed information about many software features. Therefore, the final users can use those features with more confidence.

Besides the techniques, one needs to understand the process of crafting perfect user stories. Typically, a user story consists of three Cs. The following section will find a detailed guide on these three Cs.

Card: You have the optimal size of the user story if the story can be accommodated in a card. The card does not give detailed information. But, it is short and precise to help users understand specific software features.

Conversions: The product owner should ask for customer validation before placing the user stories in the sprint. The user stories will become difficult to interpret without conversions. Nevertheless, background knowledge is essential to implement certain product features.

Confirmations: The third element of the agile user story is confirmation. Developers need to confirm that user stories have been implemented correctly. Confirmation ensures zero confusion in the process.

What makes the user stories good? Some essential features of a good user story are valuable information, concise, accuracy, estimable, testable, and many more. Ensure that your user story has these elements to render accurate and seamless information on various software features. Developing agile user stories has become a common practice for developers nowadays due to the advent of complex and feature-rich applications. Users love to get guidance before using such applications, and user stories help a lot in this regard.