Artifact: story

BMAD’s signature artifact — a context-rich story-[slug].md that is the atomic unit of implementation. Unlike a tracker ticket, “Stories in BMad aren’t isolated tickets. Each story file embeds architectural decisions, dependency context, and project conventions directly into the implementation artifact.” A story carries:

• Status (backlog → ready-for-dev → in-progress → review → done) and an As-a/I-want/so-that statement.
• Acceptance Criteria and Tasks/Subtasks (checkboxes mapped to ACs).
• Dev Notes — architecture constraints, source-tree touch-points, testing standards, with [Source: docs/<file>#Section] citations.
• Dev Agent Record — Agent Model Used, Debug Log, Completion Notes, File List, Change Log (filled during implementation).

The story file is the concrete mechanism of BMAD’s context engineering: because it embeds everything the implementer needs, bmad-dev-story can run in a fresh context. Each story is an independently shippable vertical slice, and a new one is created only after the previous is done, so learnings propagate.

Produced by (backlinks)

• bmad-create-story — expands one backlog item into a full context-filled story file.
• bmad-create-epics-and-stories — produces the epics + stories breakdown the stories come from.

See Also

• artifact-issue — the plainer tracker-issue counterpart (MP / SpecKit); a BMAD story is an issue with all its implementation context inlined.
• artifact-plan-md — a flat task list, versus the story’s self-contained context bundle.
• pattern-context-engineering — the technique this artifact realizes.
• stage-plan, stage-implement — authored in plan, consumed in implement.