User Story should I N V E S T

My short summary of the book User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn.

In the previous post we saw what is user story. Now I will summarize what are the main attributes of good user story.

The main attributes of good user story are:

• Independent
• Negotiable
• Valuable
• Estimatable
• Small
• Testable

User stories should be independent as much as possible. If they are not independent it can be a problem to estimate and prioritize them.

User stories should not be contract between developers and customer. It must be possible to achieve agreement what is part of the user story.

User story must present value to user or customer.

It must be possible to estimate user story. Usually it is not possible to estimate user story if it is too big or is full of domain specific terms.

User story should not be too big nor it should be too small. User story should be just right in the size. How to achieve right size of user story? Well it depends on team an experience.

It must be possible to test user story. If it is not possible to test user story then you are not able to tell when you have finished with user story implementation.