User story

In software development and product management, a user story is an informal, natural language description of one or more features of a software system. User stories are often written from the perspective of an end user or user of a system. They are often recorded on index cards, on Post-it notes, or in project management software. Depending on the project, user stories may be written by various stakeholders including clients, users, managers or development team members.

User stories are a type of boundary object. They facilitate sensemaking and communication, that is, they help software teams organize their understanding of the system and its context.

User stories are often confused with system requirements. A requirement is a formal description of need; a user story is an informal description of a feature.

With Extreme Programming (XP)., user stories were a part of the planning game.

In 2001, Ron Jeffries proposed a "Three Cs" formula for user story creation:

User stories are written by or for users or customers to influence the functionality of the system being developed. In some teams, the product manager (or product owner in Scrum), is primarily responsible for formulating user stories and organizing them into a product backlog. In other teams, anyone can write a user story. User stories can be developed through discussion with stakeholders, based on personas or simply made up.

User stories may follow one of several templates. A team at Connextra developed the a popular user-story template in 2001:

Mike Cohn, a well-known author on user stories, regards the "so that" clause as optional:

Chris Matts suggested that "hunting the value" was the first step in successfully delivering software, and proposed this alternative as part of Feature Injection:

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