INVEST Criteria
INVEST is an acronym that embodies the key principles of writing good user stories. It stands for Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Sized Appropriately, and Testable. A user story must be 'Independent' to reduce entanglement with other stories, promoting flexibility. It should be 'Negotiable', not a contract, leaving room for collaboration. 'Valuable' indicates that it must provide value to the customer. It needs to be 'Estimable' so that teams can understand the effort required. If it is too large to estimate, it's not 'Sized Appropriately' and might need to be split into smaller stories. Finally, it must be 'Testable', meaning that criteria should exist by which the story's completion can be verified.
Guide: Understanding and Answering Exam Questions on INVEST Criteria
Importance:
INVEST Criteria are essential for Agile Project Management and PMI-ACP examination as they help in creating high-quality User Stories. It leads to building better products faster by encouraging the creation of small, independent stories, allowing for changes and improving project predictability.
What it is:
INVEST Criteria is an acronym where 'I' stands for Independent, 'N' stands for Negotiable, 'V' stands for Valuable, 'E' stands for Estimable, 'S' stands for Small, and 'T' stands for Testable. Each criterion plays a role in ensuring a useful user story.
How it works:
Each criterion in INVEST serves as a guideline for creating effective User Stories:
- Independent: The user story should be self-contained, in a way that there is no inherent dependency on another user story.
- Negotiable: User stories, up until they are part of an iteration, can always be changed and rewritten.
- Valuable: A user story must deliver value to the end-user.
- Estimable: You must always be able to estimate the size of a user story.
- Small: User stories should not be so big as to become impossible to plan/task/prioritize with a certain level of certainty.
- Testable: The user story or its related description must provide the necessary information to make the test development possible.
Exam Tips: Answering Questions on INVEST Criteria:
- Understand each criterion deeply and how they help in creating effective user stories.
- Practice identifying whether a given User Story meets the INVEST criteria or not.
- Be prepared for questions asking for the application of INVEST criteria in various scenarios.
- Remember that not every User Story may always meet all the INVEST Criteria.
- Questions may ask about adapting in situations when criteria cannot be entirely met.
- Be aware of the limitations or pitfalls of each criterion.
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