A few weeks ago I was asked to provide a “user story” regarding a project. I had never heard the term before, so I had to go find out what this person was talking about. Binoogle (yeah, that’s right, I still compare searches from Bing and Google) returned the top choice as an article on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_story
Apparently a user story is nothing more than using words to describe the requirements for someone else to use when building software. I also noticed the mention of using user stories with Agile software development. And I had to stop and think to myself, “The Hell? Do these people think this is new?” If you judge everything just from this wikipedia entry, you might think that a user story is some revolutionary new idea that has evolved from Agile within the past ten years. Well, it isn’t.
Go back to Binoogle and look up “Voice of the Customer” or “VOC”, and check on any Six Sigma references. See, getting feedback from customers, or users, has been around for a long, long time. Probably for centuries. Yet it would appear that only recently have some in the software sector suddenly found out that getting such feedback could actually streamline the development process. Talk to the user before I build something? Genius!
Not sure why I am surprised by this fact but apparently everything old is new again. Even in software development.
As a (role) I want (something) so that (benefit).
I had never heard of them called a user story. I had always heard of them as a Use Case Scenario but what the hell it is the same thing.
They are actually built into Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server as well.