User Stories & Acceptance Criteria

The DRP's requirements decomposed into user stories, each with its own Given/When/Then acceptance criteria — written per DRP, so one requirement can be broken down differently wherever it is used.

AI in this module

How AI suggestions work

There are two AI actions here, and both return a suggestion you can edit or discard — neither writes anything on its own.

  • "Generate from requirement" drafts a story and its acceptance criteria from the requirement's own title and description, grounded in the project's AI Knowledgebase. It only appears once you've picked a requirement, since a story that stands on its own gives it nothing to work from.
  • "Improve my draft" takes what you already wrote and tightens it — keeping your intent and described behaviour, putting the story into proper form, and sharpening each criterion into a testable Given/When/Then. It stays greyed out until you've written a story for it to work on.

A generated story and a hand-written one take exactly the same save path — there is no separate "AI story" that behaves differently later.

Quality checks

What "Check Quality" looks for here

Atomic, user-voiced stories. Flags a story covering more than one piece of value, written without a clear user whose point of view it takes, or carrying implementation detail instead of observable behaviour.

Testable, non-duplicate criteria. Checks the criteria are genuinely Given/When/Then, cover the happy path plus a meaningful edge case, and don't restate each other.

Real requirement coverage. Flags a story whose reference doesn't match a requirement linked to this DRP, and any linked requirement with no story tracing to it.

What it captures

The DRP's requirements broken down into user stories, each with its own Given/When/Then acceptance criteria. One requirement can produce several stories, and can be decomposed differently in each DRP that uses it.

Using this module

This module has two parts: an Overview — a short note on how this DRP decomposes its requirements, the granularity chosen, and any sizing conventions — and the stories themselves, added one at a time beneath it.

Every story in the DRP gets the next number in one running series: UA-1, UA-2, UA-3, and so on. A story can decompose a requirement linked to this DRP — shown next to its number, e.g. UA-2 (REQ-001) — or stand on its own if you don't use the Requirements section. A requirement with three stories appears on three rows.

  1. 1Click "+ Add user story" and, if the story decomposes a requirement, pick it — only requirements linked to this DRP are offered. Leave it on "No requirement" for a story that stands alone. You can tie, change or untie the requirement later from Edit; the UA number stays the same.
  2. 2Write the story as "As a [role], I want [goal], so that [benefit]", or have AI draft it from the requirement.
  3. 3Write the acceptance criteria as Given/When/Then, one per line — the line breaks are what separate them.
  4. 4Save. Edit or delete any story afterwards from its row.

Numbers are never reused or renumbered. Deleting UA-2 doesn't shift UA-3 down, and the next new story is not given UA-2 again, because a Test Case or the Traceability Matrix may already cite it — reusing it would silently repoint that citation at different content.

Review and approval

Reviewed as a whole — the Overview and every story together, in one sign-off, like every other module. Once submitted, no story can be added, edited or deleted; to change one, press "Reopen to edit", which cancels the round and returns the module to In progress.

Unlinking a requirement from this DRP is refused while it still has stories here, and the refusal names them. Delete them from this module first, or choose to delete them as part of unlinking — a deliberate second action, never a silent side effect.

Tips

  • "Export CSV", at the top of the page, downloads this table as a spreadsheet file — handy for sharing it with someone who works in Excel.
  • Link this DRP's requirements first — the module can't offer you anything to write against until it has some.
  • The module warns you which linked requirements still have no story, so you can see coverage at a glance.