Definition

Una historia de usuario es la unidad de trabajo más pequeña en un marco ágil. Es un objetivo final, no una función, expresado desde la perspectiva del usuario del software. – Fuente

In consultation with the customer or product owner, the team divides up the work to be done into functional increments called “user stories.”

Each user story is expected to yield, once implemented, a contribution to the value of the overall product, irrespective of the order of implementation; these and other assumptions as to the nature of user stories are captured by the INVEST formula.

<aside> 💡 INVEST

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To make these assumptions tangible, user stories are reified into a physical form: an index card or sticky note, on which a brief descriptive sentence is written to serve as a reminder of its value. This emphasizes the “atomic” nature of user stories and encourages direct physical manipulation: for instance, decisions about scheduling are made by physically moving around these “story cards.”

Common Pitfalls

• a classic mistake consists, in teams where the Agile approach is confined to the development team or adopted after a non-Agile requirements phase, to start from a requirements document in narrative format and derive user stories directly based on its structure: for instance one story for each section of the document
• as the 3 C’s model emphasizes, a user story is not a document; the term encompasses all of the knowledge required to transform a version V of the product into version V’ which is more valuable with respect to a particular goal
• the level of detail corresponding to a user story is not constant, it evolves over time as a function of the “planning horizon”; for instance a user story which is scheduled for the next iteration should be better understood than one which will not be implemented until the next release
• a user story is not a Use Case; although it is often useful to compare and contrast the two notions, they are not equivalent and do not admit a one-to-one mapping
• a user story does not in general correspond to a technical or user interface component: even though it may sometimes be a useful shortcut to talk about e.g. “the search dialog story”, screens, dialog boxes and buttons are not user stories

Expected Benefits

For most Agile teams user stories are the main vehicle of incremental software delivery, and offer the following benefits:

• mitigating the risks of delayed feedback, all the more so
• if the increments are small
• if the software is released to production frequently
• for the customer or product owner, the option to change their mind on the details or the schedule priority of any user story not yet implemented
• for developers, being given clear and precise acceptance criteria, and ongoing feedback as they complete work