Business analysis glossary
INVEST Criteria
What it is
INVEST is a checklist for good user stories: Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small and Testable. A story that fails several of these is usually too big or too vague to plan. The letters remind teams that a story should be independent of others where possible, open to discussion, valuable to a user, small enough to estimate and clear enough to test.
Why it matters
Teams use INVEST to spot weak stories before a sprint starts. Fixing a story at refinement costs minutes; fixing it halfway through a sprint costs days. It is a quick conversation tool, not a score: the aim is to find weak spots in stories and improve them together before the sprint begins.
Example
"Build the customer account area" is not Small or Estimable at Marlow Online Store. Splitting it into "view order history", "change delivery address" and "reset password" gives three stories that pass the INVEST checks. The split also lets the product owner deliver the most valuable one first and see how customers react.