User stories in Scrum are work items that the team implements and turns into working software. The product owner is mainly responsible for developing user stories. However the team will have to work with the product owner to refine the user stories to ready user stories. This means the stories must be clear, concise, and immediately actionable. I’ve personally seen many teams struggling through the sprint, holding endless debates and get nothing done by the end of the sprint. The reason was simple that the user stories were not actionable and the result was frustration amongst team member as well as product owners.

User Stories and their Acceptance Criteria as the base of implementation work is shown by the example of drawing a house in this post.

User Stories are commonly used in context of Agile software development but that’s not a limitation. Acceptance Criteria will allow you to determine whether or not you have completed the implementation of a User Story.