Comments on: On the Misleading Lexicon of Agile Development

By: Alistair Cockburn

Alistair Cockburn — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 20:52:09 +0000

Fully agree with this post. The term “user story” has been eating at me since its invention. And its gotten worse as User Story has become more stylized over the years. However, some good news … an increasing number of people are writing “concrete scenarios” a.k.a. real stories anyway. See http://alistair.cockburn.us/index.php/The_new_user_story_is_a_real_story (or in tiny URL: http://tinyurl.com/2b94qz).

Alistair

By: Liz

Liz — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:57:05 +0000

Oops, your comments take HTML - sorry! That should have been:

As a
I want
So that

By: Liz

Liz — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:55:26 +0000

Hi again Josh,

Some stories involve single features; other stories involve several changes across existing features. I tend to phrase the story narrative as:

As a
I want
So that

Those three lines form everything I understand as ‘narrative’; I may have misunderstood.

It’s the value that’s the focus of the story, rather than the feature. If we can deliver the same value with a simpler feature, we usually get (very enthusiastic) permission do so.

The story consists of a bunch of other things, too; the conversation itself, the scenarios / acceptance criteria associated with the story, an estimate, etc.

The piece of paper we write the story title and narrative on is a ’story card’. It’s often the only bit of the story that everyone on the team gets to see, so it gets shortened to ’story’. But the card isn’t the story; just a placeholder for it (not just for the conversation). And a story is definitely more than just a feature.

Does that make any sense? This is the way I think of stories, others may differ; but it meshes with (my) reality.

By: Adrian Howard

Adrian Howard — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 03:49:46 +0000

I don’t think agile has misappropriated “story” any more than design has

I’ll go along with everybody else and think that stories are quite a good term. Remember the title isn’t the story. It’s just a marker for the conversation you have with the customer to figure out what they want (see http://www.xprogramming.com/xpmag/expCardConversationConfirmation.htm).

Also, in my experience (and this may be due to my own UX bias) stories in XP bear quite a strong relation to stories in the usability sense. You don’t start off with the small-implementable chunks. You start off with the bigger narrative blocks, and these are split and thinned into the smaller story cards during things like XP’s planning game.

Think of the whole stack of story cards as the stories. I find that these are strikingly different from more normal “requirement” documents so the different name is completely justified. In fact what the XP planning game produces is something that looks very much like the results of a task analysis grid.

Jeff Patton has some good stuff on the topic. Check his blog .

By: jevnin

jevnin — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 23:15:37 +0000

Liz - that’s a fair question. In general, it seems like stories in our context really mean “features,” so I’d just call them that. Perhaps narratives would translate to “feature details.” Then again, I generally gasp at the thought that software can simply be broken down to a set of features, but if that’s what we have to do to get them to a level where developers feel they can take a crack at building them, then I guess it works.

By: Liz

Liz — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 18:59:26 +0000

Josh, which words would you use instead?

By: Prashant Gandhi

Prashant Gandhi — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 09:56:36 +0000

Agreed.At a large media company, we have to be careful to call “stories” as requirements something else because their definition of story is the content they publish in the papers and on their website.

By: Jason Yip

Jason Yip — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 08:16:34 +0000

Agreed with Nat.

“As a… I want… so that” is not the story. It’s perhaps the title and even that form is not necessary.

“Story” in an XP setting is what happens when a person talks to another person about how something is supposed to work.

“Narrative” is a non-standard term and you probably won’t find many people in the Agile community that will know what you mean.

I do think there is probably value in bringing in some of the UX concepts and terminology into the Agile community.

Note that “requirement” is poor given that many “requirements” aren’t actually required.

I remember on the bus at XP2000, someone (I think Alistair Cockburn) said that requirements are more like wishes to which I replied, “That would make Analysts, Wish Fairies”.

By: Jack

Jack — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 06:26:26 +0000

In the XP world, aren’t stories explicity different from requirements?

Requirements are generally rigid whereas stories can be dynamic. Requirements can be met via one or more stories.

Use of story in the context of XP may not be ideal due to the previous definitions of the word, but requirement is not a suitable replacement.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 02:06:24 +0000

It would seem to me that this type of practice might be based on a line of reasoning that goes as follows:
- Computers are complicated things
- We’ve had some success at using metaphor-based interactions to make them seem slightly less complicated to the average person (in practice YMMV)
- Requirements documents for software are complicated
- If we use a metaphor-based method as the basis for coming up with requirements, maybe that will be easier as well.