Are Your User Stories Opened or Closed? - Mike Cohn

Are Your User Stories Opened or Closed?

A useful concept to keep in mind when writing or splitting user stories is to always try to write closed user stories. A closed user story is one that finishes with the user having achieved a meaningful goal. I like to think of the user being ready for a coffee break after finishing a closed user story.
As an example of a story that is not closed, consider this one from a job search website: “As a recruiter, I can manage the job ads I’ve placed.”
This story is too big to be useful. Managing is not something a user is ever done with. Think of a manager in your office. Does that manager ever get to say, “OK. It’s 10 A. M. I’m done managing. It’s time to get some real work done.”
Of course not.
The word “manage” is the big clue that we’re not working with a closed user story. Similar words might be administer, administrate, maintain, and others like that.
Let’s see how you could take this user story and make it closed.
First, consider what manage really means in this context and write stories that better reflect those meanings. On a job search site, managing the job ads means reviewing incoming applications, checking the expiration dates of ads, deleting any applications that are not a good fit, and modifying ad text to better find candidates.
So, you would write stories about specifically those ideas. The initial story is then replaced by:

• As a recruiter, I can review resumes from applicants to one of my ads so that I can pass good candidates to the hiring manager.
• As a recruiter, I can change the expiration date of an ad so that we continue to get more applications for open positions or stop receiving applications for positions that have been filled.
• As a recruiter, I can delete an application that is not a good match for a job so that no one else wastes time reviewing inappropriate candidates.
• As a recruiter, I can modify the description of any job in an ad so that we are attracting the best possible candidates for the position.

Each of these stories is closed. The recruiter-user achieves a meaningful goal by completing any of these stories. Or, as I’ve said, the user could feel it’s time for a coffee break. “Ah,” the recruiter thinks, “I’ve finished reviewing applicants. Time for a coffee break.” Or, “Ah, I’m updating expiration dates. Time for a coffee break.”.
Writing closed stories is good not just for benefits to the users, but because they aren’t so open-ended. A story that says only that a recruiter can manage job ads could mean something very different to team members than it does to the product owner. The product owner might have thought that included running reports on the effectiveness of certain keywords in the job titles. After all, the product owner might think, having those reports is vital to managing the ads effectively.
The process of writing closed stories can drive out some of that vagueness that leads to the team misinterpreting a product owner’s intent.
Are there times when an open story is a good idea? Yes—they’re fine as big, big, placeholder epics on a product backlog. So, early on in a project it would be fine to have a story about managing the job ads. But, as the time approaches to work on that story, you’ll want to split it into closed stories, each of which allows the user to accomplish a meaningful goal.