User Story

Purpose

Create clear, concise user stories that combine Mike Cohn's user story format with Gherkin-style acceptance criteria. Use this to translate user needs into actionable development work that focuses on outcomes, ensures shared understanding between product and engineering, and provides testable success criteria.

This is not a feature spec, it's a conversation starter that captures who benefits, what they're trying to do, why it matters, and how you'll know it works.

Input

Works best with: The feature or user need the story captures. Also useful: The user role, the outcome they want, and edge cases the acceptance criteria must cover.

Anything supplied with the invocation itself, text after the skill name, a pasted context dump, or an appended ARGUMENTS: line, counts as answers already given. Use it and skip whatever it covers; don't re-ask.

Arriving empty-handed? That works too. The skill asks who the user is and what they're trying to accomplish before drafting story and Gherkin criteria.

Example invocation: Write user stories for password reset via SMS for our banking app, include the lockout edge case.

Key Concepts

The Mike Cohn + Gherkin Format

A user story combines:

Use Case (Mike Cohn format):

• As a [user persona/role]
• I want to [action to achieve outcome]
• so that [desired outcome]

Acceptance Criteria (Gherkin format):

• Scenario: [Brief description of the scenario]
• Given: [Initial context or preconditions]
• and Given: [Additional preconditions]
• When: [Event that triggers the action]
• Then: [Expected outcome]