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If you ever show me a “user story” in the form of “As a user, I want to _ so that I can _” here are some of the questions I’m going to ask, so we might as well figure out the answers up front so we can skip to a set of much more interesting questions that will come later:

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Daniel Markham

@danielbmarkham

May 2

What we call a User Story isn't a spec, it's a formatted reminder to have a bunch of interesting conversations later on. It's the barest of beginnings. Thanks for reminding us again about this!

@RMinagorri

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@danielbmarkham

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@lauraklein

When does this "later" conversation actually happens? In Agile many things are "later on conversation" but I don't see them happening at any time and are a de facto definitive sentence. Honest question, really.

11:23 AM · May 2, 2022Twitter for Android

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It's a fair question but (I believe) your underlying assumptions are invalid, ie, that there is some kind of point in time where all conversations will happen for X. Think of conversations as dynamic and continuous, not fixed boxes to check off.

Daniel Markham

@danielbmarkham

May 2

Given the same User Story, different teams will need differing amounts of discussion. Also, hopefully, some discussions can resolve issues for multiple stories. It is a non-predictable thing. If we knew the answer to that, we wouldn't need US to begin with. We'd just write specs.

Daniel Markham

@danielbmarkham

May 2

One more piece of info. For folks who like that US title format, the reason it works well is that what we need is an acceptance test. This format helps us get there. We have convos until we know enough to have a test, then we write code to pass the test.