If you’ve any experience in agile approaches for software development, one of the common arguments surrounds documentation. Mostly it centers on software requirements, but it also extends to other forms of documentation, for example design or user centered documentation.
Many agile teams struggle with documentation. My experience aligns with folks leaning one of two ways:
- Either they continue to write requirement documentation (and literally ALL documentation) as if they were still operating in a Waterfall environment, or
- They write user stories that are so terse as to be hardly useful in describing the customer’s expectations. And they often stop writing anything else.
In other words, they go to the extremes of documentation instead of finding a healthy, lean, and communicative balance. One of the reasons for this seems to be our view of documentation as being the sole “repository” for product and team knowledge. While that’s true, I also like to remind agile teams that there is another viable form or place for that knowledge – which is the teams’ memory. Since many of the agile ceremonies are whole team events, I like to ask teams to use their collective memory as part of their product information and knowledge archive.
I presented at a local professional group the other evening. I was discussing Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD), but started the session with an overview of User Stories. From my perspective, the notion of User Stories was introduced with Extreme Programming as early as 2001. So they’ve been in use for 10+ years. Mike Cohn wrote his wonderful book, User Stories Applied in 2004. So again, we’re approaching 10 years of solid information on the User Story as an agile requirement artifact.
My assumption is that most folks nowadays understand User Stories, particularly in agile contexts. But what I found in my meeting is that folks are still struggling with the essence of a User Story. In fact, some of the questions and level of understandings shocked me. But then when I thought about it, most if not all of the misunderstanding surrounds using user stories, but treating them like traditional requirements. So that experienced inspired me to write this article.
I read a recent article/blog post by Steve Johnson where he made the case for something he calls “market stories”. Here’s a snippet from the post:
Lately I’ve been talking to people about “market stories.” Combined with personas, market stories describe the market problem on an emotional level, before you break it down into product stories and user stories and tasks. They inspire our internal teams to want to help customers as people, not just as buyers.
For example: “My father wandered away from home and we can’t find him.”
It happens to me on a weekly basis. I’m teaching a class on how to write User Stories. Usually it’s part of my Product Owner workshop. We’re happily writing stories for an iPad application simulation. Typically halfway thru the exercise someone raises their hand because they’re struggling with the format of a purely technical story. Quite often they don’t know how to frame the “user” clause and are stuck there in their writing.
My first recommendation is often to tell them to skip it. I tell them that the “As a” and the “So that” clauses are usually quite different for technically related stories. I just ask them to quantify the need (technically), in clear English with perhaps a couple of sentences, and then move on.
