

Since stories should be completable in one sprint, stories that might take weeks or months to complete should be broken up into smaller stories or should be considered their own epic. Many development teams avoid discussions of time altogether, relying instead on their estimation frameworks. No need to guess at stories when you can source them from your customers.

Kanban teams pull user stories into their backlog and run them through their workflow. In scrum, user stories are added to sprints and “burned down” over the duration of the sprint. Stories fit neatly into agile frameworks like scrum and kanban. Requirements are added later, once agreed upon by the team. User stories are a few sentences in simple language that outline the desired outcome. Note that "customers" don't have to be external end users in the traditional sense, they can also be internal customers or colleagues within your organization who depend on your team. The purpose of a user story is to articulate how a piece of work will deliver a particular value back to the customer.

It’s an end goal, not a feature, expressed from the software user’s perspective.Ī user story is an informal, general explanation of a software feature written from the perspective of the end user or customer. A user story is the smallest unit of work in an agile framework.
