Writing user stories for internal technical tasks

Question

I am attempting to manage my projects a little better so I am looking at attempting to apply some of (eventually all) the features of scrum.

Looking at user stories specifically the high level format seems to be:

As a User I can Feature Description

or

Artifact is Doing Something

How would I write "Upgrade the Database"?

Is it simply Upgrade the Database?

I think I am being thrown off as there is no specific actor/customer and that the customer is the IT department.

Answer 1

AS A [person/role]
I NEED TO [do something] 
SO THAT [provides business value]. 

For your example a user story might look like this:

AS A user of the XYZ application
I NEED TO get reports of ABC faster
SO THAT we can increase our conversion rates.
ACCEPTANCE CRITERIA - The database reliably completes transactions on average in 2 seconds.

I've added an acceptance criteria because without this you will never know when the job is done. Now at this point, you have a business case for upgrading the database. This story would be decomposed into a story where the role is the IT department or DBA, like so:

AS AN administrator for the database server
I NEED TO upgrade to the latest version of FancyDB 11.7
SO THAT we can improve the average transaction time for XYZ users to 2 seconds.
ACCEPTANCE CRITERIA - the new version starts successfully, the XYZ developers sign off on the test installation of 11.7, data migration is successful, we have cut over to the new db

When story decomposition is added to your box of tools, the story must start from where the user is a real part of the business, and the "so that" leads to a real business value. Then decompose the story into one or more stories in which internal users do things "so that" real users get the benefits in need.

Here are a couple of articles that talk about Story Decomposition:

http://jpattonassociates.com/the_shrinking_story/

http://old.cognitive-edge.com/wp-content/uploads/1999/11/56-1999-11-Paradox-of-Story.pdf