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One More Complaint About Agile Tools
The misuse of user stories is another reason to dislike agile tools.
Last week I wrote about my love-hate relationship with online agile lifecycle management tools. I noted that in some cases, team members use agile tools to avoid having conversations or collaborating with each other.
This week I was reminded of another reason that I dislike agile tools. That is because of the havoc they have brought to user stories.
Actually it isn’t the tool itself that is to blame. It is people of course. The tool is just doing what it is designed to do. Which is, to keep track of things. Unfortunately keeping track of things has been taken to great lengths — too far I would argue. Let’s explore.
The Origin of (User) Stories
One of the more useful practices that came out of Extreme Programming (XP) back in the 1990’s is user stories. Or simply “stories” as they were called when Kent Beck wrote about them as one of the XP Practices in his 2005 book, Extreme Programming Explained (2nd Edition).
Plan using units of customer-visible functionality. “Handle five times the traffic with the same response time.” “Provide a two-click way for users to dial frequently used numbers.” As soon as a story is written, try to estimate the development effort necessary to implement it.
— Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained (2nd Edition)
Here is a more detailed explanation from ExtremeProgramming.com:
User Stories are written by the customers as things that the system needs to do for them. They are similar to usage scenarios, except that they are not limited to describing a user interface. They are in the format of about three sentences of text written by the customer in the customers terminology without techno-syntax.
Note the last line — in the format of about three sentences of text written by the customer in the customers terminology. Just three sentences, which is not much. And that brevity allowed user stories to be written on cards, typically 3X5 or 4X6 cards.
Cards could be put on a wall, or table, or sorted by priority in a deck. You could quickly create new…
