Alex Rivera | Logout

Agile - User Story Definitions

Asked 2008-11-18T19:41:15.600
12

I'm writing a small app for my friend's business, and thought I'd take the opportunity to brush up on some Agile Project Management training I did at the start of the year.

I (and I think, my current organisation!) have always struggled with gathering requirements in the form of User Stories, which take the form:

As a [User Type] I want [feature] so that [some benefit]

I'm always tempted to miss out the beginning and end, and just leave the feature - but this then just becomes requirements gathering the old way!

But I don't want to just make it fit, so that I can say 'I'm doing Agile'.... for example, if I know that the user is to be presented with a list of items, then the reason is self-evident, is it not?

e.g.

As a [Store Manager] I want [to see a list of Stock Items] so that ... ?

Is it normal practice to leave out the [so that] clause?

Edit
Report

2 Answers

5

No, it's actually not obvious - there are a lot of reasons to want to see a list, a lot of things you might want to with it - scan it for some info, get an overview, print it, copy and paste it into a word document etc. And what exactly it is will give you valuable hints on reasonable implementation details - formatting of the list, exact content; or even a hint that a different feature might be a better idea to satisfy that need. Don't be surprised to find out that the reason actually is "so that I can count the number of entries"...

Of course, this might in fact not apply to you. My actual point in fact is that there are reasons that people came up with this template - and there are also reasons that a lot of experienced people don't actually use it. And when you are new to the practice, you are not in a good position to assess all the pros and cons of following a practice, so I'd highly recommend to simply try to follow it closely for some time. You might be surprised by the usefulness of it - or not, in which case you still learned something and can drop it with a clear concise... :)

answered 2008-11-18T21:06:16.707
2

User Stories is another way of saying you need to interview your users to find out what they want and what problems they are trying to solve. That the heart of having this in agile development. If the form is not working for your then take a step back and try a different approach that feels more natural to you or better suited to your capabilities as a writer.

In short don't feel like you have to be in a straight jacket. The important thing is that you follow the spirit of the methodology.

In this specific case you want to get a list of what problems the user has, why they are problems, and what they think will help them.

answered 2008-11-18T19:53:52.377

Your Answer