User Stories in Agile Development

User Stories

A user story is a brief statement that identifies the user and her need. It makes an incisive abstract that can be associated with your personas. Because personas tend to be pretty general, you might have several user stories associated with one persona group. Here’s an example user story for a hypothetical industrial parts database:

“As an Industrial Facilities Manager, Cathy is responsible for maintaining production systems and sustainability, which includes keeping equipment functional. She needs quick access to maintenance information and parts supply for her facility’s entire inventory.”

Notice that the user story identifies who the user is, what she needs, andwhy she needs it.

Here’s another example of a user story that might apply to the same website designed to meet our first user’s need:

“Jack owns a small landscaping business. He needs to be able to order replacement parts and have access to resources that will help him safely and properly service his equipment on his own.”

This second example maintains the same structure, but represents a very different user. An industrial parts database is likely to have a wide array of users with different needs, big and small. User stories help to document the practical differences in need among those users. I’ve worked on projects just like this one, where a website — despite being a database of niche manufacturing supplies — needed several user stories for each persona group. In one recent project, we began by identifying six different persona groups, which means that the possible number of user stories could be as many as twenty or more. Good thing they’re brief!