user-stories

The User Stories skill is a professional agile development utility designed to standardize requirement gathering and documentation for software projects. By enforcing the INVEST criteria—Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, and Testable—it ensures that technical tasks are well-scoped and ready for implementation. It empowers product owners, developers, and team leads to create clear, actionable, and consistent user stories that eliminate ambiguity.

• Standardizes user story structure using the [Persona, Action, Benefit] template to ensure every requirement has a clear user context.

• Implements the Given-When-Then behavior-driven development (BDD) format for all acceptance criteria, making requirements immediately verifiable.

• Provides a built-in checklist for validation across key areas: Happy Path, Validation, Error Handling, Performance, and Accessibility.

• Offers advanced splitting techniques for large user stories, such as segmenting by workflow, persona, or data type to maintain agility.

• Includes a library of INVEST failure patterns and anti-pattern fixes to proactively improve story quality before they enter the backlog.

• Serves as a critical companion for the /design command workflow, ensuring that architecture decisions are backed by validated requirements.

• To use, provide the core business objective; the skill will generate a structured story along with test cases.

• Ensure you specify the persona clearly to receive tailored acceptance criteria relevant to the end-user, administrator, or power-user context.

• Apply this skill during the initial project setup or feature discovery phases to prevent scope creep and technical debt.

• The output is strictly formatted for developers, making it compatible with Jira, GitHub Issues, or custom project management backlogs.

• Avoid vague criteria like 'system works' by utilizing the provided checklists to enforce measurable outcomes for performance and error scenarios.