User story

In software development and product management, a user story is an informal, natural language description of one or more features of a software system. User stories are often written from the perspective of an end user or user of a system. They are often recorded on index cards, on Post-it notes, or in project management software. Depending on the project, user stories may be written by various stakeholders including clients, users, managers or development team members. In software development and product management, a user story is an informal, natural language description of one or more features of a software system. User stories are often written from the perspective of an end user or user of a system. They are often recorded on index cards, on Post-it notes, or in project management software. Depending on the project, user stories may be written by various stakeholders including clients, users, managers or development team members. User stories are a type of boundary object. They facilitate sensemaking and communication; that is, they help software teams organize their understanding of the system and its context. User stories are often confused with system requirements. A requirement is a formal description of need; a user story is an informal description of a feature. In 1998 Alistair Cockburn visited the Chrysler C3 project in Detroit and coined the phrase 'A user story is a promise for a conversation.' With Extreme Programming (XP), user stories were a part of the planning game. In 2001, Ron Jeffries proposed a 'Three Cs' formula for user story creation: In 2004, Mike Cohn generalises the user story principles beyond the usage of cards in a book that is now considered as the reference standard for the topic according to Martin Fowler. After a first article in 2005 and a blog post in 2008, Jeff Patton publishes in 2014 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. 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.