Thanks for sharing your perspective, Dave. I agree that if developers have no knowledge about the problem to be solved and the users of the problem, applying user stories will be challenging. The solution, in my mind, is to involve (some of) the development team members in the strategizing work rather than opting for a traditional requirements engineering approach. Hope this helps!

In regards to Ian Courts comment “where does common sense / best practice fit into user stories”. I’ve been working as a software developer for over 20 years and I would say it doesn’t. Everything should be specified, although if certain practices are done by default in your application there should be a number of documents that can be referred to such as coding standards, design standards etc which state this and will avoid having to specify the same requirements and a default for the developers to revert to if not otherwise specified in the story.

Where best practice is used, each team member should be aware of why it is best practice, as no best practice is applicable in 100% of scenarios and can lead to unnecessary system bloat by following it blindly. This is where common sense comes in to understand if this practice is required in the specific scenario. I’ve seen companies spend hundreds of thousands of pounds developing software following best practice that has then gone unused because it is not actually fit for purpose.

Ideally, developers will have a clear idea of the problem being solved and will raise any concerns as part of backlog grooming /refinement and if they do, hold onto those developers as they are worth every penny. Unfortunately, with the trend of out shipping development to cheaper countries, often these contract developers don’t have a vested interest in the product and will just follow instructions by the letter, and even Roman’s advice of writing stories together doesn’t always fix these issues. In these situations, nothing should be left to chance. Something that you think is common sense, may not be common sense to someone else so create documented standards for your developers to follow.

Thank you for sharing your question Ian. It sounds to me as if you and your development would benefit from joint user story and product backlog work: Ideally discovering and refining together but at least, ensuring that you discuss the user stories with the team before the they are worked on. This creates a shared understanding of the functionality that needs to be implemented. If you already collaborate on the user stories but you still experience the issues you described, then explore their causes in one of the next sprint retrospectives. It might be that the dev team lacks domain knowledge and you therefore have to capture all error cases at least for now, or it might be that people lack motivation and are not fully committed to the product, for example.

Does this help?

These things include – scroll bars missing from a list page (how does the user scroll if their mouse has no scroll wheel?), a list of typo issues being addressed, but only the exact ones mentioned – others that were missed, but still obviously wrong were excluded, combo boxes being sorted by database ID rather than alphabetically. (how does the user find what they are looking for).

The user story and it’s acceptance criteria (in my view anyway!) should cover the explicit business requirements that are related to the piece of functionality. Best practice should be assumed (worse case a quick message from the developer to the PO validating assumptions).

The user story becomes a mini waterfall functional specification if every single button and detail has to be documented, diagramed/mocked up otherwise?

Is it just me who has the wrong understanding to user stories and their acceptance?!

Thanks for sharing your question Debbie. You are right: A common mistake is to restate the narrative in the acceptance criteria. One way to discover the criteria is to ask, “How will we know that the story is done?” and “What conditions need to be fulfilled so that the functionality described in the narrative has been successfully implemented?” Testers tend to be great partners to find the right acceptance criteria. Hope this helps!

Hi Syed Mehdi,

Thanks for your feedback and sharing your questions. I prefer to capture user interactions as separate artefacts, for example, workflow diagrams, scenarios, and storyboards, rather than adding them to the narrative or acceptance criteria of a user story. Please see my article “User Stories are Not Enough for a Great User Experience“. Having said that, I recommend that your stories capture end user functionality and focus on the what, not the how: How a user story is implemented should be decided by the development and described in form of an architecture model, for instance.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for your feedback and question Abhinav. I haven’t written any job stories to be honest. I tend to use personas to describe the users and the problem they want to see addressed, and I employ user stories to capture the solution that helps solve the problem. But I’d encourage you to experiment with job stories and see how they work for you.