I’m sorry but I need to vent. I’ve been encountering these patterns a bit too often lately and I just need to get these thoughts off my chest.
The patterns are these:
- Organizations and teams consider it the Product
Owners role/job to write every aspect (word) of every User Story. And,
if the stories aren’t “complete enough” the team kicks it back to the Product
Owner to do a better job.
- User Stories are too robust. I’m being kind here. The Product Owner / Analyst writing the story writes a complete requirement (pages, all information) before ever showing it to the team.
From my perspective, these are both agile requirement anti-patterns, you shouldn’t be doing it this way, and I’ll try to explain why. In both cases, I think it goes against some of the very core principles of the agile methods. It’s not changing your Waterfall views and while, you’re saying you’re agile on the outside, on the inside you’re still handling your requirements the same old way.