A few years ago, I was chatting with a senior developer about Robert C. ‘Uncle Bob’ Martin and the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP). It struck me that the principle might not just apply to software design, but could also be a useful way to think about writing agile user stories.
So I’ve been sitting with the question: should user stories follow the Single Responsibility Principle too?
Continue reading Should agile user stories follow the Single Responsibility Principle?Last year, while searching for a video on YouTube—that definitely sounded more purposeful than what was probably closer to the truth, “while I was mindlessly scrolling through social media”—I came across a video by story analyst, speaker and UCLA Extension Writers’ Program instruction and author Lisa Cron called “Wired for Story”.
This quotation (at 44′ 05″) stood out for me:
A story is about how what happens affects someone in pursuit of a deceptively difficult goal and how that person changes internally as a result.
Lisa Cron
It stood out for me, not just because I’m fascinated with stories and because I am in the process of a long writing project, but also because in my day job we use something called ‘user stories’.
I shared Lisa Cron’s quotation with a former colleague one day during our weekly one-to-one and we quickly started considering how this might speak to our discipline of writing user stories within software development teams.
Continue reading User stories change people