What is a User Story?A User Story describes functionality that will be valuable to a User Role of a system or softwareUser Stories are composed of 3 aspectsCardConversationConfirmation
There are many different sizes of users story. No one size fits all, and what might appear very large to some teams might appear to be just fine to others.
Sometimes, a story is so large that we really don’t need a lot of extra analysis to know that they are just too large for words. In most shops, these stories are called epics.
Relative scale is really the crux of story sizing.
Really, as long as a story is satisfying those INVEST principals, there really isn’t a size limit on the small side. It can be taken to the extreme, but in the end it is about providing some level of business value to the customer.
We really want our stories to be sized so that we don’t carry them over very often. If we can keep in mind that our goal is to provide a piece of functionality that can actually add value, no matter how small that value is, we will go a long way into finding the right sized stories for us.
Too often I will hear “well we finished the story, but the testing had to wait until the next iteration”.