Questions frequently come up about “What’s the Right Level of Detail to Put in an Agile User Story?” – I want to share some thoughts with you on that subject. There is no absolute right/wrong answer about how much detail a story should contain – the best answer is “it depends”.
Level of Detail in an Agile User Story – What Factors Effect the Level of Detail?
The level of detail in the story depends on a number of factors including:
- The complexity and nature of the story itself
- The level of interaction available from the Product Owner to explain what is required
- Where the story is in the overall lifecycle – there are at least three levels of detail required depending on how you plan projects, releases, and sprints:
Project-level Planning | Least detailed, suitable for very high-level project planning |
Release-level Planning | Medium detail, enough detail to do story point estimates |
Sprint-level Planning | Most detail, suitable for actually starting development and planning development tasks |
Useful posting.
That’s right, we need “Just enough” and not more.
Another factor that may determine the amount of detail is how distributed the team is. The more distributed, the more detail – but as always it’s just enough for the purposes of getting a shared understanding.