INVEST in the user story
The INVEST mnemonic was the idea of Bill Wake back in 2003 as a reminder of the characteristics of a good quality Product Backlog Item or user story.
- Independent. A user story should be as independent of other stories as possible.
- Negotiable. A user story is not a detailed specification – instead it is a reminder of attributes for discussion and clarification.
- Valuable. User Stories should be valuable to the user (or owner) of the product. Written in the language of the user and framed in a way that would make the customer perceive them as important – part of the continuum of the whole experience with the product.
- Estimable. User Stories need to be possible for engineering and design to estimate. They need to provide enough information to be reasonably estimated and assessed for further break-down if necessary.
- Small. Big enough to take a couple of days but not so big that they can’t be easily accomplished in a couple of man-weeks (ideally one sprint). Smaller stories get better estimates.
- Testable. If a user story is well written and easy to understand then it is easy enough to test or to prove that what is delivered meets expectations.
In the end as a product manager or product owner there is no one way to deliver requirements that guarantees that you will get exactly what you want or what you feel the market needs.
Having more conversations more frequently across all teams and with customers, seeing and sharing more prototypes and taking a collaborative approach to the design and engineering of products helps to bring more appropriate products to the market.
