
Today, it’s interesting to talk about agile user stories best practices. It’s not everytime easy to know what is the best practices; So this article will give you some practices to help you to choose theses ones will be better for you.
A lot of practices exist about user stories but which ones will be better for you? How to optimize your backlog and its items? Let’s look together.
Before the agile user stories best practices
If you’re not really familiar with the user-stories, you have to start to understand the basics concepts. Here is our first article to read to understand what is a classic user story : Agile user story
We did a real example to help you to really understand this concept of user story : Example: ecommerce user story.
We talk every time about the 3C model to explain how to build user stories: 3C model for the social aspect of user-stories
A format to help us the first time
Indeed, we purposed before a simple format to make the user story easily : story A4. The first time is not easy to make your own user story with all the necessary details; So the best way is to use this format: Story A4 – user story template
how to split the user stories?
The first time, it seems very complicated to cut the user stories; but you have to understand it’s a mandatory if you really want to settle well you product backlog. But no worry, we did an article to help you to split the user stories when you need: How to split his user-stories?
The agile user stories best practices
To start to create the first user stories for a new product, we advice you to create a story mapping. the practice is really useful to define the first user stories of your product backlog. Here is an example below:

You can read our article about this practice which will help you to create your first story-mapping: User Story Mapping – example
Product backlog refinement
In scrum, we recommend to refine every time the backlog. For that, a lot of teams do the product backlog refinement practice. The team will take time (often like a special ceremony) to refine the user stories that the team will develop soon.
Article to know what is the product backlog refinement: Product Backlog Refinement (old name: grooming)
During this refinement, the teams have to estimate some items. For that, they can use the poker planning which is friendly to estimate: Planning Poker: estimate your user stories

If you don’t know what is the story points that the teams use to estimate the user stories: Story points in agile – definition, example
Useful link: User story agile (french)
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