10x to 100x faster.
1,000x more thorough.
Want to know more? Read the details on the kind of testing performed by ScopeMaster or book a demo below!
Why does user story testing matter?
User story testing revolves around the concept of real business requirements. A real business requirement (or capability) is “what must be delivered to provide value to the business” (Robin Goldsmith). User stories are the discrete functional requirements that make up that capability. They are the bread-and-butter building blocks behind any successful project.
If it can be misinterpreted, it will be.
Different readers can—and often do—interpret the same user story different ways and draw different conclusions, which can lead to misunderstandings, wasted energy and wasted time. To work as ideally as possible, we must work as unambiguously as possible.
125 Reasons to Test User Stories
The average ratio of words in a user story to the typical number of coding tokens is about 1:125. A 12-word user story amounts to around 1,500 coding tokens, which translates to approximately 300 lines of code. That means for every minute spent fixing an ambiguous word in a user story, you’ll save 125 minutes in coding. Talk about time well spent!
Extreme Left Testing
User story testing may sound like a strange idea, but it really isn’t; we’d actually argue it’s one of the most productive things that you can do on a software project, which we define as extreme left testing. In a nutshell, this boils down to testing user stories as early as possible in the process. User stories are complex beings that must adapt swiftly to change, meet certain requirements and involve many moving parts. Therefore, much like other software development deliverables, they too are prone to errors. The sooner you start testing, the sooner you can catch mistakes… and combat major problems before they prove problematic.
What if you don’t test your user stories?
Poor user stories and poorly defined requirements ultimately lead to poor outcomes. Such outcomes run a substantial risk of serious production defects (as noted in a 2021 Accenture study). Without testing, problems that otherwise would’ve been resolved much earlier in the process could become incredibly costly later on down the line. So our philosophy is to test early and test often!
Follow Discipline & Eliminate Ambiguity
When we write code, we follow certain disciplines to improve readability, reduce complexity, and much more. (For more on the matter, we suggest reading the excellent Code Complete by Steve McConnell.) Writing user stories warrants such discipline, as it allows you to minimise ambiguity and inconsistency. A good story could very well be a boring story so long as it is unambiguous! If you’ve still got questions, then ScopeMaster has answers, and will help you learn everything you need to know along the way.
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