While I will not claim to be an expert at writing user stories, I am experienced. It is not always enough to simply follow the pattern. Like any analysis pattern, there are some things that one can do to improve their stories. Over the last couple years I have learned the following:
1) User stories for a new software product are different than stories for subsequent releases.
When you start writing stories for a new product, you may not know who all the actors are. You may not know what all of the relevant metaphors or entities in the business domain are. You haven’t defined any software capabilities or features yet – so your stories tend to be a little more abstract – a little more open. If you already have a domain model from an earlier analysis or a prior system, it can help to reflect on the nouns in your stories and see if they correspond to known domain entities. It is important to drive consistency in your words, across all stories in the backlog, so that you don’t confuse either your subject matter experts or your development team. When you already have a software product, sometimes the user experience abstractions become nouns in their own right. You have defined innovative capabilities that make possible business practice that was not practical without your software. Often stories in later releases reference capabilities delivered in earlier releases, as an enhancement, expansion, or alteration of the original capability.
2) The words we use in user stories are important.
3) Even though user stories are “independent” from an implementation perspective, they are not from a language perspective.
Here are some positive ideas that you can apply to improve your user stories:
- Pay close attention to the nouns in your user stories. Nouns are either actors, metaphors, or features. Make sure they are consistent, and maintain a list with definitions, so that you can explain these to your developers. Effectively, these become the metaphors or entities in your domain model.
- Pay attention to the verbs in your user stories. Verbs are actions that are either done by the actors or by the system on behalf of an actor. Make sure that all your verbs have a clear actor and a clear object. This is one way to flush out the hidden actors and metaphors in your domain. For each action, ask “who does this?”
- Pay attention to adverbs and adjectives in user stories. In my experience, adverbs and adjectives are nothing more than unwritten acceptance criteria. They describe other nouns and verbs in your stories and they simply beg to be elaborated. Ask yourself, how you could “quantify” that adjective or adverb. Or how you could define it. Sometimes it is performance, other times it is user experience.
- Reflect across your stories, to ensure that the language is consistent. Make sure your nouns mean the same thing in all the stories. Make sure your verbs mean the same thing in all your stories. Make sure where you have adjectives and adverbs, that you quantify them or define them consistently. Adjectives and adverbs that are used frequently, may become first class stories of their own, describing performance requirements, or user experience standards.
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