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Agile development is an iterative and flexible process. Rather than specifying all the requirements of a project up-front and adhering to them throughout the development process (as happens in waterfall development), the requirements are listed as items in a product backlog. Specifiying software in this flexible and responsive way is better for customers and better for users. The product backlog is prioritised by the ' product owner ' (a role that represents the business users of the product to be developed). They can change the priority of an item in the backlog at any time. Each item in the product backlog represents a block of work to be done, which should ultimately result in ' shippable product ', otherwise known as a feature that users can use. Items in the product backlog are called 'user stories', which can be an epic (an overarching dewcription of some functionality), a spike (a time-boxed investigation), a bug (broken functionality that needs fixing), ...

User stories are part of the Agile process. Agile development is iterative and broken down into sprints. Each sprint delivers “shippable product” – something that can actually be used by users, and which has business value. A user story looks like this: “as a [role], I want to do [task], so that I can achieve [goal]”. A non-technical reader who knows nothing about the system should be able to read your user story and understand it.The user story should not describe the technical details of how the goal will be realised; this should be left to the developers. The aim of a user story is to describe how the system will deliver business value to the end users. There are different types of user stories for different situations. You should write "epics" at an early stage, when you are working out the concepts behind the system, and the overarching problems you want to solve. Later, break your epics down down into more manageable user stories (features) at the point when you are nea...