One of the things that I’ve come to value in my agile journey is our local Raleigh / Durham agile community. It’s one that I’ve had a hand in creating and guiding over the years. But one that’s taken on a life of its own.

I can’t tell you how many wonderful agilists are here in my local area. Some are:

Mary Thorn, Josh Anderson, Ken Pugh, Jason Tanner, Laurie Williams, Agile Bill Krebs, Andy Hunt, Ken Auer, Catherine Louis, Cory Bryan, Jeff Barschaw, Tom Wessel, my colleagues at Zenergy Technologies, and the leaders of our local AgileRTP and ALN groups. Literally, we have a community of thousands in our Meetup groups and our local TriAgile conference draws 500+ folks annually.

www.triagile.com

A couple of other local folks that I want to call out are Laura Burke Olsen, Arjay Hinek, and Matt Phillips. They are collaborators in a group/website entitled Collaboration Explored. It is a website focused on Collaboration inspired by the late Jean Tabaka. I think it’s wonderful that these folks (and others) are continuing the work that Jean inspired.

Comment

The user story has nearly become the ubiquitous requirements artifact in agile contexts. So much has been written about the user stories, their format, how to write them, the associated acceptance tests, and more.

As for acceptance tests, we’ve moved beyond writing them to articulating them as “executable tests” in tools such as Cucumber and Robot Framework.

All of this evolution has been great, as is the focus on the collaborative aspects of the user story.

But I’m starting to see something troubling in my coaching travels. I think we might be focusing too much on the user story as an agile requirement artifact. Instead, we should be taking a step back and considering the user story as a much simpler communication device.

That is simply as STORY, and much less as a written story, but more so as a story that is told…face-to-face.

3 Comments

Agile Training

Communicating with Metaphor’s

Focusing on the STORY in the User Story