Use story is nothing but end users requirement. What differentiates a user story from a requirement is that they are short and sweet. In one sentence they are just enough and nothing more than that. User story ideally should be written on index cards. Below figure ‘User Story Index Card’ shows the card. Its 3 x 5 inches (8 x 13 cm) card. This will keep your stories as small as possible. Requirement document go in pages. As we are keeping the stories short its simple to read and understand. Traditional requirement documents are verbose and they tend to loose the main requirement of the project.
Note: - When I was working in a multinational company I remember first 50 pages of the requirement document having things like history, backtracking, author of the document etc. I was completely drained till I started reading the core requirement.
Every story has a title, short description and estimation. We will come to the estimation part later.
Note: - Theoretically it’s good to have cards, but in real scenario you will not. We have seen in actual scenario project manager keeping stories in document and every story not more than 15 lines.
Figure: - User Story Index Card