Good Story Makes Scrum

There are three main things that you need to do in order to make scrum working. You have to create backlog, build a fully cross-functional team and deliver tested software. But this all is still not enough if you don't have a good user story. And from the other end, good user story will bring these values naturally. How do we know that the story is good? Good user stories follow the INVEST model or something similar.
Independent
Stories have to be as independent as possible. The simple reason is that dependent stories cannot be prioritized. The customers (via the PO) should be always able to say what is more important and what is less. Dependent stories are also smuggling waterfall into scrum as I already mentioned in Agile Killers. 
Negotiable
The story describes what the user wants. What is the value to the user. There have to be a space for collaborative discussion between the PO (customer's proxy) and the dev team.
Valuable
Each story should bring a business value. It doesn't make any sense to work on something that has unclear value. The value can be functional or non-functional and it allows to find the priority. It is also possible to get feedback from such story.
Estimable 
Stories that are not estimable - it is not easy to say what is the size - need to be split. If we don't know how to split it we probably need some research on such story before we can start working on it. The size and the value play important role in prioritizing the story. A story with great value but very large size may not be the highest priority item.
Small
How small is a small story? Sometimes it can be quite challenging to define this. In every case it should contain only the minimum amount of work that needs to be done and nothing else. Do the simplest thing that works and then stop.
Testable
This means that the story allows for test-driven development and easy answering the question "How do I know I'm done". 
Stories bring the process. Process doesn't bring stories
Now when you take a look at this again, you should see that that successful working on such stories requires strong product ownership, prioritized backlog and a cross-functional team. Things that enable successful agile process. Stories bring the process. Process doesn't bring stories. 
2/6/2017

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