CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2012/ch2b 1w70 nl

SaaS - 4.2 - SMART User Stories

Background

User stories are the basis for defining the functionality of any given system. They are a short description of the system that capture what the system does and the end result or output of a system. When we say User Stories, we don’t define any particular criteria as to how a user story should be written. A user story can be “Customer should have a good UI experience” or “When a customer logs in he/she should be able to see all the technical details of the product he/she has selected, with the reviews, price displayed alongside and an option of ‘Add to Cart’ to go along with it.” Both the user stories described above are correct but one leaves too much for one to assume and the other gives one specific information in terms of display and functionality. The problem with the first user story is it is not restricted to any particular guideline, its just a user story but has no scope and hence can be either very short or very long. The advantage with the second user story is that it has been written based on a given set of goals which can be acronymed as SMART and will be explained below.