Benefits of good user stories.

How important is it to write good user stories in agile? 

Considering the name, it's clear that user stories informally elaborate the product functionality from the end user's perspective. In the agile framework, user stories act as the end goal to meet software requirements. User stories generally express the customer's perspective so that the development team can focus more on day-to-day activity, creativity, collaboration, and, most importantly, better outcome. The ultimate purpose of writing a user story is to focus on business values and prioritizing customers needs. Tip: User stories are part of xP – eXtreme Programming and not part of scrum.

7 benefits of writing good user stories in the Agile framework

Prioritize organizational values

The biggest benefit of a good user story is delivering the highest value to the end-users needs. A conventional product development team takes months to prioritize user value. The agile team implements the same task within a few hours and helps achieve increased organizational value every sprint.

Supports better understanding 

As user stories focus on using business terms instead of technical jargon, both developers and customers can easily comprehend the purpose of the writing. User writing workshop should be collaborative and scrum team should not continue to write user stories in waterfall way.

Give weightage to effective communication

There's no chance of miscommunication as user stories support verbal communication and face-to-face discussion over written communication.

Boost collaboration among team members

Good user story with minimalistic writing helps the agile development team for collaboration and effective discussions that emerge varying business perspectives that come the right way for fulfilling internal and external user's needs.

Keep backing to transparency

When written collaboratively, transparency is automatically boosted among the product owner, team members, developers, and stakeholders. Thus, a reliable working environment has been created, which helps in making swift decisions.

Minimize potential risks

Another significant benefit of the user story is minimized risk. Most conventional business teams don't take any proactive course of action for risk reduction. Whereas an effective user story gives all the attention to customer requirements to eliminate possible risks like financial, technical, and risk of communication gap, commercial, and many more.

Prioritize product backlog

When adjusting to customer needs, product building has to be constantly adjustable to increase the end value. During product development, if the user story doesn't provide value, the product owner can eliminate that defective specification and let out the production with the rest of the implemented features.

How to write good user stories in agile?

Get acknowledged to the following secrets to creating good user stories in agile.

1. Write evidence-based user stories on product functionality to describe from the customer's perspective.
2. Emphasize the verbal discussion of the user stories between the development team, product owner and key stakeholders.
3. Keep avoiding the usage of confusing words or technical jargon to make the writing easily understandable. User Story should include what user needs not how you are going to solve.
4. For elaborating on brand new products, start your writing with high level ideas also known as epics and break it down further in to features user stories. This will help determine the best needs of users.
5. Put the user stories up on the wall space to make them accessible for collaboration among the whole organizational team.
6. In most cases, User Stories should be small enough to be completed in sprint or less.

Start your agile stories now

Start creating a well-formed user story to articulate top-level requirements in agile frameworks like XP and scrum. Premium quality user stories convey the product team's ultimate requirements of customers. At the same time, make the development process further efficient. Thus, investing in writing good user stories is all worthy of valuable software development team's time.  Adopting product mindset vs. project mindset will also help.

Finally consider attending one of our Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) or Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Product Owner Product Manager  (POPM) trainings.