"drive by" and "order" building signs

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Issues with user stories are common for software development organizations adopting agile ways of working. At some point in their journey, development organizations will ask, “How do we write better user stories?” Well-meaning coaches or consultants come to the rescue. Their advice usually includes adopting the Connextra user story format (also called role-feature-reason). Sometimes the advice includes standards for acceptance criteria like using the Gherkin syntax. This isn’t necessarily bad advice, however the most common issues with user stories aren’t resolved by writing better stories. Most organizations are too focused on the creation of stories. The result is often large, overly complicated templates in Jira.

The more boxes on a user story template or the more required data on a Jira input screen, the more time and money will be wasted on a symptom of the problem. As Jeff Patton states in the introduction of his book User Story Mapping, “Shared documents aren’t shared understanding.” A requirements document does a poor job of establishing a shared understanding. Even the ones that follow a standard template.

Shared documents aren't shared understanding Jeff Patton - User Story Mapping - Page xxxii

What is the Real Issue?

By probing a little deeper and asking why organizations feel they need to write better user stories, the typical responses are:

  • “How can we convey all of the requirements to the developers efficiently so they can spend more time coding?”
  • “How can we ensure we don’t miss anything so that the developers don’t discover more stories as they develop.”
  • “How can we write these stories so that the developers build it right the first time?”

Responses like these expose the reality that these organizations suffer from the problem that user stories intended to address. They avoid collaborative conversations by replacing them with a requirements document. Self-organizing teams are at the heart of agile ways of working, not “division of labor” and certainly not creating a group of thinkers separate from the laborers (the developers).

Historically, software development processes have mimicked factory processes to their detriment. These include:

  • Taylorism — a turn of the 20th-century manufacturing process attempting to optimize production lines with high amounts of managerial control over employees
  • Theory X management — a management style that assumes workers have no ambition, avoid responsibility, and can’t be trusted to do a good job.

These practices are vestiges of applying factory processes to software development. They are still prevalent in the software industry, even in many software organizations claiming agility by implementing Scrum or scaling frameworks like SAFe. Commonly, developers are considered order takers, seen as typing automatons. They get tasked with turning requirements documents into working software. This focus on efficiency and “getting it right the first time” eliminates any opportunity for iterative and incremental development (a foundational practice of agile software development).

Agile Frameworks

Unintentionally (or possibly intentionally) agile frameworks have helped to crystallize the idea that user stories are just a new format for user requirements delivered to a development team. Regardless of what the Scrum Guide may state, as practiced, Scrum teams typically have a Product Owner who is the only person in contact with the business, users, or customers. Often Product Owners don’t even have a connection to customers. Instead, they document requirements coming from their organization.

A popular agile scaling framework recommends that Product Managers be externally focused (customers & organization) while Product Owners are internally facing (Jira & developers). When your agile team looks like this, it becomes increasingly difficult to shed this misunderstanding about user stories. User stories tend to be prescriptive requirements dumped onto development teams in these environments.

Software Organizations

Product development organizations are often siloed off from engineering organizations, relying on a Project Management Office (PMO) for coordination. I’ve witnessed consultants build these divisions in a software company with the reasoning that, “We can’t have developers talking to users; that’s the Product Organization’s job. They should be writing software, they might promise something we can’t deliver because they don’t know the big picture.” While Taylorism and Theory X took hold in a growing software company, the engineering organization still claimed success because they went through an “Agile Transformation.”

User stories are a promise for a conversation. Alistair Cockburn - Agile Manifesto Co-author

User Stories are Stories, Not Requirements

User stories were named stories (not requirements) because they were not meant to be a new form of requirements documentation. When Kent Beck introduced the idea of user stories in Extreme Programming (XP), it was precisely to get away from prescriptive requirements documents delivered to order-taking developers. The “story” represents a conversation between the people with the problem (the business, customers, users, etc.) and the people who can solve the problem (the development team). No standard user story template can help a team improve if its software organization is designed to keep developers from interacting with the people for whom they are creating the software.

...It was at that moment that I learned the word "requirements" actually means "shut up". For a great many people, that is exactly what requirements do. They stop conversations about people and the problems we're solving. Jeff Patton - User Story Mapping - Page xliii

Bargain Hunting

At Industrial Logic we teach Bargain Hunting. Bargains in software development are high-value features available at a fraction of the full price. Discovering bargains requires developers to have meaningful conversations and collaborate with their business counterparts and customers. If the focus for improvement is on writing better requirements for developers to understand, your organization will be missing out on bargains.

Having only one Product Owner authoritatively specify and prioritize features leads to high-priced development. Joshua Kerievsky - Bargain Hunting

User Story Origins

To improve collaboration and decide what to build next, learn about user stories from the originators:

  • User stories in Extreme Programming
  • Learn about what Kent Beck (XP creator) has to say about user stories — the XP white book and XP dark green book are good places to start
  • Agile Manifesto co-author and XP pioneer Ron Jeffries’ 3Cs
  • Read Jeff Patton’s User Story Mapping and put his advice into practice

Get your developers connected to the software’s customers and users to have meaningful conversations. Disregard the plethora of advice overly focused on writing better stories if your development teams aren’t having collaborative conversations with customers.

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