user-story-writing

user-story-writing is a skill for Claude Code from timwukp/agent-skills-best-practice. It costs 83 tokens per session (897 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing guide for turning product requirements and large feature ideas into small backlog stories with testable acceptance criteria.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to split epics, write user stories, create Given/When/Then or EARS criteria, and check whether a story is ready.
Why use it?
It helps teams make work specific enough to estimate, build, and check, while identifying stories that are not ready.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the secure-sdlc-skills plugin — 6 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to split epics, write user stories, create Given/When/Then or EARS criteria, and check whether a story is ready.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/timwukp/agent-skills-best-practice/user-story-writing
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add timwukp/agent-skills-best-practice --skill user-story-writing
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/timwukp/agent-skills-best-practice

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install secure-sdlc-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for user-story-writing

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/timwukp/agent-skills-best-practice/user-story-writing/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/timwukp/agent-skills-best-practice/user-story-writing)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/timwukp/agent-skills-best-practice/user-story-writing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/timwukp/agent-skills-best-practice/user-story-writing/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for user-story-writing

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/timwukp/agent-skills-best-practice/user-story-writing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/timwukp/agent-skills-best-practice/user-story-writing.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 83 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 897 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00083 $0.00897
Opus 5 $0.00042 $0.00449
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00179
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00090

Measured 12d ago against content hash 66d42fc6e724, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

user-story-writing scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/skills/user-story-writing/SKILL.md · 79 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 79 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

User Story Writing

Turn requirements, feature ideas, and epics into stories a team can estimate and deliver. The product is the story set, not prose about the feature.

Story Format

### [ID] [Title — verb phrase, outcome-oriented]
**As a** [specific user role — not "user"], **I want to** [action], **so that** [value the role actually cares about].

#### Acceptance Criteria
- Given [precondition], when [action], then [observable outcome]
- ...

For system-level or compliance-driven requirements where the persona format gets artificial, use EARS instead:

EARS pattern Template Use for
Ubiquitous The [system] shall [behavior] Invariants
Event-driven When [trigger], the [system] shall [behavior] Responses to events
State-driven While [state], the [system] shall [behavior] Mode-dependent behavior
Unwanted behavior If [undesired condition], then the [system] shall [behavior] Error and abuse handling
Optional Where [feature is included], the [system] shall [behavior] Configurable capabilities

INVEST Check

Run every story against INVEST before delivering; fix violations rather than annotating them:

  • Independent — schedulable without forcing another story into the same sprint
  • Negotiable — captures intent, not implementation; the "how" stays open
  • Valuable — the "so that" names value for the role; "so that the database is updated" fails
  • Estimable — a developer could size it; unknowns extracted into spike stories
  • Small — fits comfortably in a sprint; otherwise split (see below)
  • Testable — every criterion observable; "works correctly" fails

Epic Splitting Patterns

Apply the first pattern that yields shippable slices:

  1. By workflow step — each step of the user journey is a story (browse → select → pay → confirm).
  2. Happy path first — story 1 is the simplest successful flow; error handling, edge cases, and limits follow as separate stories.
  3. By business rule — base behavior first, each rule variation (discounts, regions, roles) its own story.
  4. By data variation — support one input type first (e.g. domestic transfers), add types incrementally.
  5. CRUD split — create first, then read/update/delete if each carries real value.

Read the full file on GitHub · 79 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 79 lines · 83 tokens per session scan A 66d42fc6e724

Subscribe to this mod's changes

user-story-writing is a skill published in the GitHub repository timwukp/agent-skills-best-practice (10 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 83 tokens to every session and 897 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

cognito

AWS Cognito user authentication and authorization service. Use when setting up user pools, configuring identity pools, implementing OAuth flows, managing user attributes, or integrating with social identity providers.

itsmostafa/aws-agent-skills · 38 tokens

sns

AWS SNS notification service for pub/sub messaging. Use when creating topics, managing subscriptions, configuring message filtering, sending notifications, or setting up mobile push.

itsmostafa/aws-agent-skills · 32 tokens

iam

AWS Identity and Access Management for users, roles, policies, and permissions. Use when creating IAM policies, configuring cross-account access, setting up service roles, troubleshooting permission errors, or managing access control.

itsmostafa/aws-agent-skills · 42 tokens

stakeholder-communication

Communicate effectively with stakeholders across functions and seniority levels. Use this skill when writing status updates, preparing executive reviews, sharing technical decisions with non-technical audiences, managing up, communicating bad news, or designing the communication cadence for a project. Triggers on…

rampstackco/claude-skills · 103 tokens

syndic

Gère un parc de copropriétés en France avec vue portfolio consolidée. Couvre administration, comptabilité (décret 2005, plan comptable copro, 5 annexes), assemblées générales (convocation, PV, notification), appels de fonds, travaux, fournisseurs, recouvrement d'impayés et transition de syndic. Maîtrise les majorités…

romainsimon/paperasse · 194 tokens

contact-cache

Track all identified/contacted people across strategies. CSV-backed contact database with dedup by LinkedIn URL or email. Prevents duplicate outreach when running strategies on a recurring cadence.

gooseworks-ai/goose-skills · 38 tokens