User Requirement and User Story in Agile

Requirement refers to what you want from the product and user story refers to how the product will help you. In another term requirement refers to what the product should do and user story refers to how the user can achieve what he/she wants from the product.

Even if requirement and user story sound similar and seems to be confusing without any difference still both are different according to their perspective. In this article, we will explain user story and requirement in detail. Let’s start.

What is User Story?

A user story is used to describe how the project creates value for the end user. The responsibility for writing code that meets the requirements of the user story currently rests with the development team. In ideal situations, developers work closely with business owners and stakeholders to iron out the details of code creation.

Use cases and technical requirements documents are not a substitute for user stories. Instead, product developers can create user stories to help organize the features that will be deployed along the project timeline. A user story can be considered the beginning of a conversation that defines the real demand for the product.

What is Requirement?

Software requirements explain the behaviours that the program should have. They include descriptions of the target system's features and capabilities. The business analyst, product manager, or product owner writes the requirements. Both technical leads and the engineers who will work on the features or upgrades are frequently involved.

Example of a Requirement

Using the field name, surname, email, free text, and a submit button, you can create a user contact form. The customer service team receives an email when the submit button is clicked.

Software components define the functionality that an application must have. They contain descriptions of the functions and capabilities of the target platform. Requirements are prepared by a product manager, product owner, or business analyst. CTOs and engineers working on features or updates are often involved.

User stories are typically used more frequently in the agile technique than requirements documents are in the classic waterfall methodology.

The customer journey what the person using the product wants to be able to do—is the main focus of the user story. Functionality, or what the product should be able to accomplish, is a conventional focus of a requirement.

Main Difference Between User Story and Requirments

• User stories are typically used more frequently in agile techniques, whereas requirements documentation is typically associated with traditional methodologies.

• User stories encourage more conversation and participation than requirements documents because of their lighter weight.

• The real needs can have changed by the time software is implemented in accordance with a formal requirements specification. Anybody should be able to make contributions to the user story backlog at any moment when using user stories. This may be from a developer raising concerns about technical debt, the customer asking for a new feature, or a tester spotting a UX problem. The backlog guarantees that the work being done is in line with the needs of the customers because it is a joint effort.

Requirement to User Story

It could be exceedingly difficult to accomplish if the need contains unstated assumptions. For instance, is a mail server accessible? If not, it can take a lot longer to develop the requirement. Other times, the design may prevent finding a less complicated approach to do the same thing.

The user story, on the other hand, describes a user approaching our support team. If sending mail is impractical or too costly, we can immediately come up with an alternative solution. For instance, we could write to a database, employ a form via Google Docs, or just use an email address instead of the form. With a need, this is difficult to accomplish, but with a story and a marketing specialist present, it is simple.

Agility

Due to this, whenever we have needs, we usually try to anticipate these express our beliefs, and make sure everything goes smoothly. So, in this instance, a different requirement that was planned in advance to ensure the presence of a mail server might have been present.

This brings us to another significant distinction between requirements and stories, namely hierarchy. As I demonstrated above, needs must by their very nature be arranged in some sort of natural hierarchy to order to satisfy dependencies. Stories, on the other hand, are purpose-driven and do not have these limitations.

This seems to be deliberate because with agile, it's crucial to add, remove, postpone, and alter stories as necessary during the course of the project. Although requirements can occasionally be changed or eliminated, moving them around is typically quite difficult due to all the dependencies. Simply put, it is not done frequently. Your rapid deployment will suffer if you are working with specifications, or it won't be very agile in the sense that it has the capacity to accept change at all.

Conclusion

In conclusion, an unstructured general explanation of a software feature written from the perspective of the end user is known as a user story. Its purpose is to explain how a software function is useful to the user. It's tempting to think that user stories are just specifications for software systems. The user requirements stage focuses on identifying the goals and needs of the user so that the technology can easily meet those needs.