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Scrum User Stories and the 3 Things That Make Them Complete

January 30, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Agile Project Management, Project Management Definitions, SCRUM

Scrum User Stories and the 3 Things That Make Them Complete
By Patrick Merg

A really good scrum user story will have three things to make it useful and complete:

• Who
• What
• Why

I’ve seen so many user stories that have the Who and What nailed but they miss the Why. Adding the Why seems to be the hardest part, but it’s so useful for prioritization and for stakeholder understanding.

So what are these user story elements?

• Who: the primary actor. The Who can be generic like customer, user or specific such as specialized user of a system. The Who can also be a non user such as a server; I’ll give an example later.
• What: the action the primary actor wants to take.
• Why: the value or the reason the primary actor wants to do the action.

When writing user stories it’s better to use standard phrases to ensure the completeness of the user stories:

1. “As a” to identify the Who
2. “I want to” to identify the What
3. “So that” to identify the Why

Here are a few user stories as examples:

1. As a customer (who) I want to add items to a shopping cart (what) so that I can purchase them (why)
2. As a server (who) I want to receive well formed xml (what) so that I can process XML without errors (why)

Patrick Merg is a determined, results-oriented management professional that creates, sells, and delivers high-value, innovative business software solutions. He utilizes leadership, communication and interpersonal skills to build high performing agile software development teams that meet and exceed goals. Patrick has a strong background in agile project management, leading software engineering teams and innovative product development. He runs a blog on Agile Project Management, which can be found at: http://patmerg.blogspot.com/

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• Project Management Process - Phase 3 - Implementing - User Training

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 and is filed under Agile Project Management, Project Management Definitions, SCRUM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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