I have earlier written a post about writing user stories for agile (Scrum) projects. During several projects I have now refined the way I do this and in this post I will explain my preferred way to write user stories.

I have changed my mindset when writing user stories by using the INVEST acronym. The INVEST acronym is 6  rules of thumb that you use when writing/defining the user stories.

Independent
Negotiable
Valuable
Estimable
Small
Testable

You can read more about the INVEST-model in Mike Cohn’s book User storied applied – For agile software development.

I have also refined the template I use for writing user stories. I am still inspired by Mike Cohn and I used his template for user stories as a base for my own template.

I am using MS Word when I am writing my user stories and I sort the stories by actors.

I find this template very effective when writing the stories and easy to read and see if all stories are covered. It is easy to find the stories by using the table of content in MS Word.

If this were a large system you would have several subsystems with several actors for each subsystem. Then you will see the advantage of having the table of content so you can go directly to the correct subsystem and actor instead of browsing through the whole document.