What is User Story in JIRA?

What is User Story in JIRA?

Introduction

User story is a way of depicting software’s expected features from a user’s perspective.

It’s a tool in Agile software development and gives us an end-to-end description regarding what is required by the client to work in the software, why it is required, how to it will work and what is the end output required once it is run/triggered. It helps in shifting the focus from writing about requirements to talking about them.

These stories help the development team in understanding the requirements of the business.

User stories are very specific as to give a clear understanding to the development team about the expected outcomes.

Acceptance criteria are one of the most important features of user stories – as it helps the development team in implementing functionalities. These acceptance criteria also serve as a reference point for quality assurance checks.

Agile projects have a dynamic ecosystem and writing JIRA stories is the best strategy to maintain the requirements for the same.

User stories 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 such as clients, users, managers, or development team members.

Why follow the approach of JIRA Stories?

Requirements keep changing as the project progresses and with user story approach, we can replace the big upfront design with the “Just enough” approach and is thus flexible.

Benefits:

It has a simple format and helps in saving time and prioritizing the requirements and at the same time is flexible/versatile enough to be used on large or small projects alike.
It helps in bringing about a business value by delivering a product that the client really needs.
It helps in avoiding false completeness.
It helps in working at a small level and thus changes/corrections/additions/deletions can happen in between.
Technical functionalities can be taken care of by the tester, architect, etc.

A good user story should be INVEST

How to write a good User Story?

The basic template that we need to follow should capture the essential elements of requirements

Who it is for? What is expects from the system? Why it is important?

Here ROLE defines whom we are writing it for; we must be specific.

The behavior of the system is to be written as an ACTION which is usually unique for every user story so that it can bring about a result that is unique and is not dependent on other user stories.

Why signifies the Benefits which are a real-world result, and which can help other users or customers as well and not just the user in the story.

Ron Jeffries, one of the creators of XP has given 3 primary components to user stories – Card, Conversation, and Confirmation to describe 3 elements of User stories