Agile User Stories and Application as Persona

In Agile, requirements are communicated via user stories.  Traditional user stories use the form, “As a …, I want to …, so that I can ….”.  For example, “As a first time user, I want to be able to create a user name and password, so I can securely do transactions.”   That enables functional requirements to be captured as user features, but still does not address the often critical “non functional requirements” (NFR) in an Agile framework.  NFR are items sometimes associated with infrastructure, such as capacity, scalability, reliability, availability, or security.

One approach to including NFR in an Agile context is to create user stories based upon the application itself as having a role or persona.  For example:

“As an application, I want to be able to process xxx transactions per second, to be able to handle peak monthly demand.”

“As an application, I want to be resistant to SQL injection attacks, so that my transaction integrity remains valid.”

Appropriate acceptance criteria need to be included; phrasing those can be challenging in these cases.

Extending the concept of the application persona further, it can also be used for other aspects of the application, such as user interface or user experience.  Those may fall outside the straightforward transactional features covered by more typical user stories; use it for the more qualitative ones, the fuzzier parts.  The usual guidelines still apply: make the story as granular as possible;  and to include acceptance criteria.  Acceptance criteria can be very difficult to create when one is trying to specify aspects of user experience as quality or beauty.

Taking this further still to the more general case of product development, including the difficult cases of ad campaigns or branding, the concept of the application or product as a persona remains tenable.

E.g., “As a brand, I want to be able to highlight the excitement of using our products, so that I can …..”


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