Writing Effective User Stories in JIRA

by Rumesh Wijetunge
05th Feb, 2018
Last updated on 17th Jun, 2021

User stories are one of the main methods of communicating requirements to developers/development team in an Agile project. It is important for the individual tasked with documenting the requirements to be able to write effective and detailed enough user stories. The user stories are required to be comprehensive enough to enable the developer/development team to start analyzing, designing and developing the required functionality, feature or requirement stated in the user story.

This article while intending to guide individuals on how to write effective user stories is also intended to advise on the best practices of creating user stories using JIRA as a requirements management tool for creating stories and tasks.

What is a User Story?

User stories are short, simple descriptions of a feature in the system under development told from the perspective of the person who desires this new capability. This person is normally a user of the system or even a customer who pays for the solution.

User stories typically follow a simple template as below.

As a <type of user / user role>, I must be able to <some goal / feature> so that I can <some reason / benefit>.

User stories are often written on index cards or sticky notes and pasted on an information radiator or in other words a scrum board. This article is however on maintaining user stories using JIRA and on how the tool can be used to ensure regular conversation.

Writing user stories on an index card is actually the ‘Card’ part of the 3 C’s in user stories. It is said that a user story should be long enough to fit into an index card and be detailed enough to arouse discussion.

Writing user stories in JIRA

A new user story in JIRA can be created by selecting the option to create a new issue of type ‘Story’ as shown below.

The user story in the format listed above can be written in the summary field of the new issue creation screen.

User story definition should satisfy the INVEST criteria which implies that the user stories should be:

Independent (of all other user stories and be able to exist on its own)
Negotiable (not a specific contract for features but be able to be used to facilitate discussion among relevant stakeholders)
Valuable (create some business value)
Estimable (to a good approximation)
Small (so as to fit within an iteration)
Testable (in principle, even if there isn’t a test for it yet)

Trace your Customer Requirements to user stories in Agile through the integration with JIRA. https://t.co/esXyAJykZy pic.twitter.com/DZoa1tJrjL
— Visure Solutions (@VisureSolutions) 21 November 2017

JIRA also provides the option to set priority of user stories which might have been done based on the MoSCoW criteria, due dates, assign the story to a team member of the project, allocate a story point/hour based effort estimation for the story, tag the user story to a component level feature or in other words ‘Epic’ and be able to assign the story to a sprint during which the story is required to be implemented.

Adding description to user stories

The 2nd C of the 3 C’s in user stories that is ‘Confirmation’ is used to specify the acceptance criteria of the user story. An acceptance criterion is used to ascertain when a particular user story can be marked as done and is normally used by the product owner to validate the same. The acceptance criteria also help the development team implement the business rules, functionality and will be the single point of reference for the Quality Assurance Team. The description field in JIRA issue creation provides space for the user to specify the acceptance criteria.

Gearset’s Jira Self-hosted (on-prem) and Jira Cloud integration lets you automatically post deployment updates to your tickets & keep up-to-date with the progress of your user stories. https://t.co/qvDlNK5LLr pic.twitter.com/yh8RmUL1Gm
— Gearset (@GearsetHQ) 29 January 2018

Enabling discussion

Another main aspect of writing requirements as user stories is to enable conversation about the feature among relevant stakeholders. This is known as the ‘Conversation’ component of user stories which is the 3rd C in the 3C’s.

Often user stories are accompanied with a process diagram, UI wireframe or a mockup, data dictionary etc. which can be added as attachments in JIRA or even be associated with the story as comments, wiki page links maintained in confluence.

Conclusion
Writing user stories is an easy method of maintaining requirements in a dynamic environment of an Agile project. JIRA, as explained above, provides a powerful and rich set of features which helps manage requirements in an efficient and convenient manner.

Rumesh Wijetunge

Chief Innovation Officer - Zaizi Limited, Chief Operating Officer - LearntIn (Pvt) Ltd., Director /

Rumesh is an IT business leader with over 12 years of industry experience as a business analyst and project manager. He is currently the CIO of Zaizi Limited, a UK based data management company heading the operations in Sri Lanka, the COO of LearntIn, a global training institute based in Sri Lanka and is also a lecturer / trainer at multiple private universities on management, IT, business analysis and project management subjects. He is the current president of the IIBA Sri Lanka chapter and is one of the most qualified and sought after trainers in Sri Lanka. Refer his LinkedIn profile for more details and to see more articles he has written on linkedin

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1 comments

Adil 08 Aug 2018

Very informative post and I have got good sight from the points you mentioned

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