The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

by Dan Olsen

Agile thought leader Bill Wake created a set of guidelines for writing good user stories; to make them easier to remember, he uses the acronym INVEST: Independent: A good story should be independent of other stories. Stories shouldn't overlap in concept and should be implementable in any order. Negotiable: A good story isn't an explicit contract for features. The details for how a story's benefit will be delivered should be open to discussion. Valuable: A good story needs to be valuable to the customer. Estimable: A good story is one whose scope can be reasonably estimated. Small: Good stories tend to be small in scope. Larger stories will have greater uncertainty, so you should break them down. Testable: A good story provides enough information to make it clear how to test that the story is “done” (called acceptance criteria).