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Understanding I.N.V.E.S.T. for User Stories

The document outlines the I.N.V.E.S.T. criteria for writing effective user stories in Agile development, emphasizing that they should be Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, and Testable. It also explains the concept of Epics, which are larger user stories that help manage related user stories and may need to be broken down into smaller components. The document encourages collaboration among team members to ensure user stories are clear and meet the established criteria.

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Rizwan Waheed
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7 views2 pages

Understanding I.N.V.E.S.T. for User Stories

The document outlines the I.N.V.E.S.T. criteria for writing effective user stories in Agile development, emphasizing that they should be Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, and Testable. It also explains the concept of Epics, which are larger user stories that help manage related user stories and may need to be broken down into smaller components. The document encourages collaboration among team members to ensure user stories are clear and meet the established criteria.

Uploaded by

Rizwan Waheed
Copyright
© All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Invest

User stories

independent
negotiable
valuable
estimate
Small
testable

User stories

Epic: Group of user stories

Acceptance criteria

The checklist you will check to confirm if the user stories is complete or not

User stories consist of: The user, the action they will take and the benefit to
them.

Invest purpose for user stories:

Each user story should meet six different criteria, represented by the acronym
I.N.V.E.S.T., or invest. I, for independent: the story should be able to be started
and finished by itself. It's not dependent on another story to finish it. The N
stands for negotiable: there's room for negotiation and discussion about this item.
The V is for valuable: this means that completing the user story has to deliver
value. E is for estimable: our Definition of Done must be clear so that the team
can give each user story an estimate. The S is for small: each user story needs to
be able to fit within a planned Sprint. If that user story is too big, it should be
broken down into smaller stories. Stories that are a low priority on the Backlog
can stay big until they become a priority for an upcoming Sprint. Finally, the T is
testable: a test can be written to check and make sure that it meets the acceptance
criteria. While the Product Owner is the main person responsible for writing user
stories, the team has a responsibility to give feedback on whether the user story
is clear and fits the invest criteria before they invest any time into it.

I.N.V.E.S.T.
Recall from the video that your user stories should meet the I.N.V.E.S.T. criteria:

Independent: The story’s completion is not dependent on another story.

Negotiable: There is room for discussion about this item.

Valuable: Completing the user story has to deliver value.

Estimable: The Definition of Done must be clear so that the team can give each user
story an estimate.

Small: Each user story needs to be able to fit within a planned Sprint.

Testable: A test can be conducted to check that it meets the criteria.

Epic:
Epics
An epic’s purpose is to help manage related user stories. In this
post
, Mike Cohn, the inventor of the term “epic” as it relates to Scrum, describes epic
as a “very large user story”—one that could not be delivered within a single
iteration and may need to be split into smaller stories. The team should discuss
together and reach a shared view of how to write and capture their user stories and
epics. Keep in mind, epics are just larger user stories that are there to help
organize the project.

Let’s imagine you are creating user stories and epics based on the previous
example. User stories may include customers wanting to read reviews of books on the
website or wanting to add books to their cart. These user stories could fall into
the “website creation” epic.

Another user story could be that customers want to walk into the library and easily
find the non-fiction section. This would fall under the “organization of the
physical space” epic.

So rather than those various user stories appearing in a list together, they are
organized into sections, or epics.

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