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INVEST stands for Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, and Testable. These characteristics help teams craft stories that flow smoothly through refinement and delivery. Independence reduces cross-story coupling; negotiability preserves collaborative scope shaping; value focuses on outcomes for users or stakeholders; estimability supports forecasting; “small” promotes completion within a sprint; and testability ensures clear acceptance criteria and verification. “Extensible” is not part of INVEST—while designing for extensibility can be good engineering practice, it is not a user-story quality criterion and can encourage premature generalization (“gold-plating”). CAPM’s agile coverage emphasizes thin vertical slices that satisfy value and testability within the team’s Definition of Done. Applying INVEST during refinement uncovers ambiguities, hidden dependencies, and oversized work, enabling better ordering by value and risk (e.g., via WSJF). Pair INVEST with clear acceptance criteria (e.g., Given-When-Then) and a shared Definition of Ready to stabilize Sprint Planning inputs and improve predictability.