BA Techniques: User Stories

Written by Bharath Ravi | Jul 9, 2020 9:51:25 AM

Purpose

A user story represents a small, concise statement of functionality or quality needed to deliver value to a specific stakeholder.

Business Analysis Body of Knowledge® (BABOK®) 

User stories are expressed by presenting the role, the goal, or the value. One of the main characteristics of the agile methodology is that project team members do not usually have the luxury of time to document the requirements. There is also an way to gather the feedback from users as early as possible in the project life cycle, hence the preference for concise requirement known as user stories. The user story is not the entire requirement but a synopsis of it. It can be described as a high level statement of a requirement that does not go in to excessive detail. The user stories describe the functionality or the feature that a product is expected to deliver to the user. It encourages the iterative development and can be refined as many times as possible to reach the agreement and understanding among the stakeholders. It is placed as a text on the index card and used as a remainder of the conversation between the customer and the developer.     

The user stories capture the needs of a specific stakeholder and enable the teams to define features of value to a stakeholder using short, simple documentation. They can serve as a basis for identifying needs and allow for the prioritizing, estimating, and planning of solutions. With the focus on stakeholder value, user stories invite exploration of the requirements by promoting additional conversations with stakeholders and grouping functional requirements for delivery. The user stories can be used,

  • to capture stakeholder needs and prioritize development of solutions
  • as a basis of estimating and planning solution delivery.
  • as a basis for generating user acceptance tests
  • as a metric for measuring the delivery of value
  • as a unit for tracing related requirements
  • as a basis for additional analysis

Some of the articles related to User story techniques are as follows,

 

User stories capture the requirements and can be used to model a meaningful sequence of user activities, across a prioritized activities of user stories. It encourages richer discussion in planning and prioritizing user stories, further engage stakeholder participation. It helps to understand the business impacts and can allow a team to see how user stories affect the customer journey visually. Some of the elements in user stories are,

  • Title - It describes an activity the stakeholder wants to carry out with the system. It is an active verb goal phrase similar to the way use cases are titled.
  • Statement of Value - There is no mandatory structure for user stories. It include three components such as who, what, why.
  • Conversation - It helps the team to explore and understand the feature described in the story and the value it will deliver to the stakeholder. The information in the story is supplemented by further modelling as the story is delivered.
  • Acceptance Criteria - It may be supported through the development of detailed acceptance criteria. It defines the boundary of user story and help the team to understand what the solution needs to provide in order to deliver value for the stakeholders. 

Advantages of using the User stories technique are,

  • Easily understandable by the stakeholders
  • Can be developed through a variety of elicitation techniques
  • Focus on the value to stakeholders
  • The shared understanding of the business domain

 

Some of the books for User story techniques are,

 

 
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