[Unpolished] When your perfect user stories are not so much perfect after all

By Ali Vahed

I spent hours and hours a few weeks back crafting a perfect playbook for user story creation, then got my AI co-pilot to create perfect user stories. They were INVEST, criticised by an Agile Coach role, and written with so much detail that there was no ambiguity in them. Crystal clear. I was so proud of them.

It turns out, they were not perfect after all.

In our retro yesterday, we discussed them. They had extra details, and the team needed to spend more time reading them. Having requirements (functional, non-functional, assumptions, and design) broken down into different sections also made it hard for QA to create and link test cases. The team wanted something simple. Simple is what they get. At the end of the day, the format of a user story does not matter. It is the outcome that matters.

I spent a few hours and simplified some of the user stories.

Next step: I will simplify the playbook for the AI copilot to create simpler and imperfect user stories from now on.

[Unpolished] posts are my personal experience and deliberately left unpolished and raw. I don’t want to get into the habit of polishing all my posts with AI. I keep it for only the important ones.

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