A technical story, also known as a technical task or tech debt story, is a work item focused on implementing a specific technical solution or resolving a technical issue. It captures the technical aspects of a project in a concise and actionable format.
Technical stories also introduce intermediate steps that can be tackled separately, making it easier to manage large user stories.
Technical stories are essential because they help developers:
- Improve code quality: By addressing technical debt, refactoring code, or implementing new technologies.
- Enhance system performance: By optimizing database queries, improving caching mechanisms, or reducing latency.
- Ensure security and compliance: By implementing security patches, updating dependencies, or configuring access controls.
- Technical focus: Written from a technical perspective, often using specialized terms and jargon.
- Specific solution-oriented: Clearly defines the technical approach to be taken to resolve an issue or implement a feature.
- Typically smaller scope: Compared to user stories, which may require multiple technical stories to deliver.
"Implement caching mechanism for product search results using Redis to improve page load times."
This example illustrates a basic technical story structure:
- "Implement [technical solution]" (describes the specific approach)
- "[Technical detail]" (provides context or specifies the technology used)
- "to [achieve some benefit]" (explains the reason behind the request)
User stories often rely on one or more technical stories to deliver the desired functionality. Technical stories can be considered as sub-tasks or implementation details that help achieve the goals outlined in a user story.
For instance, the user story "As a customer, I want to search for products by name or description so that I can quickly find what I'm looking for" might rely on several technical stories, such as:
- Implementing a search algorithm
- Indexing product data in a database
- Caching search results using Redis (as shown above)