Invest In Your User Stories

Recently i came across an acronym/criteria that can be used to verify if Agile User Stories are ready for the development team to pick up from backlog or not. It's the 'INVEST' criteria and this is as old as Agile where it was coined in 2003. But unfortunately not popularized and emphasized as much as the 'DONE' criteria. Less popularity for this might be because of our inherent bias in focusing more on the result/destination (DONE) than the Journey/Process (Backlog grooming, Prioritizing and Writing User Stories that fulfill this criteria). 

Chances of getting your stories 'DONE' (and DONE fast with quality as well) increase manifold when the stories are 'READY'. Stories are 'READY' only when they satisfy the 'INVEST' criteria. INVEST stands for Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small & Testable.

I - Stories should be 'Independent'.

N - Stories should be 'Negotiable' for change. This is inline with Agile manifesto, where collaboration with customer takes priority over contract negotiation. At the same time, caution should be exercised so that flexibility is not abused by being 'unreasonable' and causing 'Muri' that overburdens people & processes.

V - Stories should be Valuable to customer. Paying down technical debt also adds value to usability and availability.

E - Stories should be Small so that they are Estimable. Teams should not get caught up in estimating in absolute terms. They should use the power of Fibonacci story points in doing a relative estimation.

T - Stories should be Testable, which should encourage Test Driven Methodology.

Business Analysts and Product Owners should ensure that the user stories they are writing satisfy the above criteria. User stories should depict the 'who', 'what' and 'why' a story will be used for providing value to customer. Practice of writing from an actual user/persona point of view helps in understanding the motivation and context and thus influence the implementation decisions.

Only when the stories are 'READY', the development team can come and start addressing the 'How' part to implement.Offloading user story creation to the sprint development team defeats the whole purpose of Agile all-together.

Next time when you are asked to pick a story that's not ready, below can be a good response:

As a Scrum Team Member, I want a User Story to satisfy INVEST criteria so that I can get it DONE in time and with good quality.