We are currently coaching a new team into the ways of Agile and one of the problems we’ve encountered is getting the devs to write cards or stories using the standard Agile story formats. To Agile newbies the syntactic sugar that surrounds a story’s details often seems like a waste of time. i.e. A developer knows exactly what he means when he writes:
“Add currency code to Data Warehouse views”
and feels like he is being made to jump through hoops to turn that into:
“In order to differentiate between international sales, we need to update the data warehouse transactional views to show the currency code, so that they can report on this data.”
The reason we favour this (or the “As a [user]…” format) on agile projects is that the story describes what needs to be done and why. This means that any member of the team can understand exactly why a story has been added to the backlog and doesn’t need to get an explanation from the person that wrote the story or drill down into the acceptance criteria to discover this.
The other benefit of this format is that it forces the person writing the story to find out exactly why the requester wants that story. Indeed, in drilling down to the real requirement, the analyst may discover that the real business requirement is not what the requester is asking for at all.
Aslak Hellesoy (the creator of Cucumber) illustrates all this perfectly in the cucumber documentation where he describes the process of asking the Five Why’s to discover the underlying requirements – the why in the story.
(shamelessy copied directly from the cucumber wiki for your convenience..
[5:08pm] Luis_Byclosure: I’m having problems applying the “5 Why” rule, to the feature
“login” (imagine an application like youtube)
[5:08pm] Luis_Byclosure: how do you explain the business value of the feature “login”?
[5:09pm] Luis_Byclosure: In order to be recognized among other people, I want to login
in the application (?)
[5:09pm] Luis_Byclosure: why do I want to be recognized among other people?
[5:11pm] aslakhellesoy: Why do people have to log in?
[5:12pm] Luis_Byclosure: I dunno… why?
[5:12pm] aslakhellesoy: I’m asking you
[5:13pm] aslakhellesoy: Why have you decided login is needed?
[5:13pm] Luis_Byclosure: identify users
[5:14pm] aslakhellesoy: Why do you have to identify users?
[5:14pm] Luis_Byclosure: maybe because people like to know who is
publishing what
[5:15pm] aslakhellesoy: Why would anyone want to know who’s publishing what?
[5:17pm] Luis_Byclosure: because if people feel that that content belongs
to someone, then the content is trustworthy
[5:17pm] aslakhellesoy: Why does content have to appear trustworthy?
[5:20pm] Luis_Byclosure: Trustworthy makes people interested in the content and
consequently in the website
[5:20pm] Luis_Byclosure: Why do I want to get people interested in the website?
[5:20pm] aslakhellesoy: 🙂
[5:21pm] aslakhellesoy: Are you selling something there? Or is it just for fun?
[5:21pm] Luis_Byclosure: Because more traffic means more money in ads
[5:21pm] aslakhellesoy: There you go!
[5:22pm] Luis_Byclosure: Why do I want to get more money in ads? Because I want to increase
de revenues.
[5:22pm] Luis_Byclosure: And this is the end, right?
[5:23pm] aslakhellesoy: In order to drive more people to the website and earn more admoney,
authors should have to login,
so that the content can be displayed with the author and appear
more trustworthy.
[5:23pm] aslakhellesoy: Does that make any sense?
[5:25pm] Luis_Byclosure: Yes, I think so
[5:26pm] aslakhellesoy: It’s easier when you have someone clueless (like me) to ask the
stupid why questions
[5:26pm] aslakhellesoy: Now I know why you want login
[5:26pm] Luis_Byclosure: but it is difficult to find the reason for everything
[5:26pm] aslakhellesoy: And if I was the customer I am in better shape to prioritise this
feature among others
[5:29pm] Luis_Byclosure: true!
verticalslice 