After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- How to write a user story
- Discover how user stories are used by technical teams and the tools they use
PREREQUISITES
If you want to use Elements Catalyst for developing user stories you will need to run a free 14 day trial.
SIMPLE FORMAT, POWERFUL RESULTS
A user story is the end goal of Business Analysis. It is how you communicate a required feature or change from the end-user perspective. A user story consists of :
- As a (type of user who benefits from the change)
- I want to (what is the action or tool being asked for)
- So that I can (what is the end goal)
User stories are the result of a clear understanding of the requirements, business processes and underlying systems. They are what the development team will use to agree and develop any further resulting technical specifications necessary to configure or develop the app.
User stories can be linked to requirements and normally many user stories are related to one requirement. The requirement may be “We need multi-currency Opportunities”. But there a number of different user stories associated with that one requirement;
- adding Opportunity in CAD$
- adding Opportunity in £
- adding Opportunity in Euro
- how to calculate exchange rate
- what to do with a dramatic change in exchange rate
- changing opportunity from one currency to another
- how to calculate forecasts based on exchange rate changes
- how to calculate what to display on dashboards
- ……. and the list goes on
So it is a little more complex than the end user’s first request “I want to add Opportunities in £”. There are downstream implications that are only understood when you map the processes and get into the detail.
HOW DEVELOPMENT TEAMS MANAGE USER STORIES
User stories are what your development teams use to scope their sprints and understand what needs to be built. They manage user stories in tools like JIRA. These tools are probably too complex for business users, it is important to be able to import the user stories you build into the tools the development teams use.
ELEMENTS CATALYST
You can create user stories in Elements Catalyst. Here is an overview support article. They can be created independently or from within the requirement. User stories can have supporting information (links to notes, URL, process diagrams) and collaboration/discussion. They can also be linked to metadata items in Salesforce so they form part of your Org documentation. Elements Catalyst has an integration so user stories can be transferred to JIRA. Here is the support article Alternatively you can export user stories for importing into other development apps.