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User stories
Overview
Everything on the Kanban board starts in the backlog as a story.
A good Agile story typically describes who it is for, what they need, and why — with clear acceptance criteria. Exactly how we achieve that is for the team to interpret, and this area often accounts for a large share of our retrospective discussion. We iterate and adapt these principles as we learn.
Principles
Currently, our principles for writing and working with stories are:
- Every story should be deployable upon completion
- Acceptance criteria should be independent of other stories
- Development should tackle the story, not the big picture
- Focus on delivering a single benefit to the end user
- Stories should be small chunks of work solving a single problem
- Acceptance criteria should be written in the Gherkin language
- Develop the solution for the story as fast as possible: commit, review, refactor, repeat
Acceptance criteria (Gherkin)
Write criteria so they can be verified without depending on another story being done first. Prefer clear Given / When / Then scenarios that describe behaviour from the user’s point of view.
Related
Published 21 September 2026
Last updated 21 September 2026