Category: standard

Why I don't use standard user story format that much

March 10, 2009 by Artem Marchenko

Agile requirements are different from the traditional ones and are usually defined as user stories that allow for slicing functionality in the shippable increments. There are recommendations for a standard user story format and the most known one is “As a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason>” popularized by Mike Cohn. The trend for recommending the common format is so strong that there is an evolution and there exist even hacks for making it work in the situations when it doesn’t fit naturally.

I used to be in the same camp of standard format proponents, until I noticed that more and more my stories look closer to “Implement list widget support” and further from “As an application designer I want to use a list widget so that…”.