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Software Engineering vocabulary · Agile and Team Workflow

User story

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˈjuːzər ˌstɔːri/nounCommon term

In software engineering, user story means: A short description of a feature from the user's point of view, often written as 'As a [type of user], I want [goal] so that [reason]'.

In Turkish: kullanıcı hikayesi

How it is used

Product owners write user stories; developers estimate and split them. Each story usually has 'acceptance criteria' that say when it counts as done. People often just say 'story'.

Example sentences

  1. The user story says customers want to save their cart for later.

  2. This user story is too big. Can we split it into two?

Common collocations

  • write a user story
  • split a user story
  • acceptance criteria
  • estimate a user story
  • backlogThe ordered list of work a team has not started yet, such as features, bugs and improvements, with the most important items at the top.
  • requirementSomething the software must do, or a condition it must meet, as agreed with users, clients or the product team.
  • estimateTo judge roughly how much time or effort a task will take before you start it. As a noun, 'an estimate' is that rough figure.
  • featureA piece of functionality that users can see or use, such as a search bar, dark mode or the option to export a report.
  • ticketA record in a tracking tool such as Jira that describes one piece of work, like a bug, task or feature, and shows who owns it and its status.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Agile and Team Workflow

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