Now that your team has come up with an idea for a product or service to develop for the team project, the next step will be to describe as many of its features in the form of user stories. The concept and formatting of user stories is discussed in Module 3. Examples of user stories are provided in the Module 3 lesson materials and its resource folder for student reference as well as on the last page of this document.

Your team should document the user stories created in a Word document. While there is no firm requirement to develop a particular number of stories, students are advised to develop as many as they can for the product features identified in Phase 1. Generally, each student should plan on writing four to five stories. It is acceptable to add features as your team sees fit as the project proceeds. Remember, product development for agile projects is an iterative process – it’s quite likely you and your teammates will think of new ideas as you go through this exercise.

You should also create at least one acceptance criterion for each user story created. The description of acceptance criteria does not have to be verbose, but it should be expressed in a way the instructor can understand it. The list of user stories submitted should properly display acceptance criteria corresponding to a user story.

The goal of this exercise is to create well-formatted user stories using either of the formats which are provided in the course materials. It’s possible that your user stories will change as you go through future phases of the team project. The user stories you create for this phase and future phases should always follow one or the other of the formats provided.

Each team will be allowed to develop its own format for this assignment. You may organize your user stories within your submission as you see fit, as long as the format and content are intelligible to the instructor. Please be sure, however, to provide a cover sheet identifying the assignment and the team submitting it.

Your team’s user stories list must be submitted in NYU Classes by Saturday, 7/21. As was the case for the first phase of this project, this assignment will be NOT be graded. The instructor will again provide feedback to each team to be used to revise and improve the content. Your team will organize the stories you create into a project backlog and release plan as part of Phase 3. You will include your final product backlog with the final team project materials your team will submit for the in-class presentation at the end of the course.