Design Technique 13: User Stories
An eXtreme Programming (XP) design technique called User Stories provide a very brief way to capture a high level perspective from the client (in XP everyone is a customer / stakeholder). Early Warning: Don’t mix User Stories up with longer and more formal Use Cases which involve greater detail and which are for another purpose. User Stories are a series of brief - one or two sentence - statements about what a particular part of the system you are designing needs to provide. They are written by the customer in plain english and can be stored as cards and prioritized. They should also be portions of the project small enough to be implemented in a set timeslot (perhaps a day or a week depending on the size of your project and its complexity).
User Stories provide you with an initial design overview which can indicate how long it will take to implement a solution. This naturally improves your ability right at the beginning to offer satisfactory quotes. How many times has someone walked into your office saying - “I need an e-commerce package and how much will it cost?” - or better “I’m not sure about the functionality I’ll need but we can work that out later if you just give me a ballpark figure NOW that you’re willing to stand by LATER”. Oh the joy of commercial uncertainty! So you can see it would only take a couple of minutes to show the client how to make User Stories and how they might also be useful in web development projects.
A good point to press here is User Stories are just the beginning of a longer process and not an end in themselves. You can add meat to them and flesh out finer detail as the project goes forward. They’re simply an initial capture of information to give an overview and provide a focal point of discussion between the client and your team.
This is best suited to the ‘always available’ client as opposed to the ‘never available and time-poor’ variety I’d suspect. A guiding principle of all XP techniques is the idea that ‘the customer is always available’. Anyway, give User Stories a go and tell me how it worked for you because I’m interested. I can see that another benefit would be early client / customer buy-in as the practice of getting them involved early and providing you with tangible input can be key to their continued investment in the outcomes. In short, get them involved early.
