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Enough detail is enough is the usual response.
On the project we are currently busy with (which was incomplete and handed over to us without any brs/documentation/user stories of any sort, we get stories like:
As a Product Owner I need the developer to test the XXX workflow so that it works correctly.
and
As a Product Owner I need the developer to test the YYY workflow so that it works correctly.
No indication is given of what "correctly" means.
When asking for more detail, one is informed that you are asking for too much detail and since this is agile, the requirement will become clearer later during the sprint (2 week sprint) and you should not worry about the detail just then, but rather to just give the story a weight in "doll hairs" and stop being difficult. Be a big picture guy. Don't worry about the detail.
Is this what agile is supposed to be like?
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A user story should be written with the minimum amount of detail necessary to fully encapsulate the value that the feature is meant to deliver. Any specifications that have arisen out of conversations with the business thus far can be recorded as part of the acceptance criteria.
User stories are a few sentences in simple language that outline the desired outcome. They don't go into detail. Requirements are added later, once agreed upon by the team. Stories fit neatly into agile frameworks like scrum and kanban.
5 to 15 user stories per sprint is about right. Four stories in a sprint may be okay on the low end from time to time. Twenty is an upper limit for me if we're talking about a Web team with lots of small changes to do.
So the question is how small is small? A good rule of thumb is that no user story should take longer to complete than half the duration of the Sprint. That is in a 2 weeks Sprint for example, no user story should take longer than 1 week to complete.
When asking for more detail, one is informed that you are asking for too much detail and since this is agile, the requirement will become clearer later during the sprint (2 week sprint) and you should not worry about the detail just then, but rather to just give the story a weight in "doll hairs" and stop being difficult. Be a big picture guy. Don't worry about the detail.
Not really. User stories capture the essence but this doesn't mean no details. Details are transmitted during conversation and are definitely mandatory for a good understanding of what has to be done (not even mentioning that it seems hard to estimate anything if you don't know what to do and what is expected).
Communicating details about stories is actually a part of the job of the Product Owner (PO). This should occur during the first part of the Sprint planning meeting where the PO explains each stories to the team, before the planning poker and/or at anytime if any clarification is required. In other words, feel free to ask the PO for details (and ask the PO for the acceptance criteria too). And if there is too much uncertainty, put a big estimate in front of the story and explain why you can't make a "better" estimate.
To me, your PO/customer/stakeholders don't seem to participate very actively and this is a big, very BIG impediment. Your ScrumMaster needs to take care of this, there is no magical solution.
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You should ask as much details as needed to feel comfortable to estimate story.
You may add some acceptance tests criteria to back side of story card (these don't have to be detailed).
As a customer I want to pay with credit card...
Test with Visa, MasterCard
By the way your stories seems a bit strange. They should be customer/feature centric.
21
Scrum backlog items/User Stories do not need to be very specific to be added to the Backlog.
More details is required to make them sprintable (schedulable in a Sprint). Enough detail is needed at that time so that it can be estimated, and it should have a clearly defined completion criteria.
A User Story is a promise for a conversation with the Product Owner about the scenario it covers.
Premature details are a waste.
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