I’ve long held that the most important part of the iconic scrum-agile-xp user story format (“as a…I want…so…”) is the “So” section. You know, the part that gives the reason for the story?
As this post points out, the “so” is often given over to tautology or ignored entirely.
A few of us got talking while doing an inception early in 2009 that the ‘so that’ statement was often either repeating the requirement, was too general or was left off completely when capturing stories. This meant that we were missing the true goal of the business and lead to problems with scope and misunderstandings of what a story truly meant once we got into delivery.
The proposed solution is simple, elegant, and awesome: put the “so” before the “what”.
Check out the examples given in the post. With this new format you can’t write a story without thinking about and documenting it’s motivation. It’s impossible. It’s great.
so that… so what? - jkBlog
