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I have yet to see a single user story that actually gives any correct details of what the user wants or is doing, though. They're invariably written by product
by jofer 3y ago
I have yet to see a single user story that actually gives any correct details of what the user wants or is doing, though. They're invariably written by product managers who have never been in the users shoes and have absolutely zero understanding of what the product is or what the users do.
The engineers building a product have typically actually been in the users shoes. The product managers almost never have.
When I start seeing user stories that aren't actively harmful, I might feel differently. As it is, the first thing you should do as an engineer is throw away the user story or management's description of the problem and go straight to the actual user feedback.
User stories are like watching a fish try to describe a bicycle....
- xcv123 3y ago> I have yet to see a single user story that actually gives any correct details of what the user wants or is doing, though You're working in soft domains. Typically a business would have very specific hard requirements for processing financial transactions and related information. If you work in banking or insurance the requirements need to be clearly defined by the business.
- jofer 3y agoNo. I'm working in very technical domains. Management has zero understanding or background in anything. Engineers have a minimum of a PhD in the field + at least a decade of experience in the field + software engineering experience. We've been in our users shoes. Management has not and can't even understand the industry.
- xcv123 3y agoYou will have a different experience in something like insurance, where requirements come from external integrated systems, third parties, actuaries, government regulations, business analysts etc. Not clueless managers.
- TheNewsIsHere 3y agoI feel for the above commenter. I cannot relate to their experiences as fulsomely. Within my past several roles I have always had a really good experience with engineering, requirements gathering, and how those disciplines are executed by stakeholders, including management. It’s fair enough to say that having worked at a cryptography company where the CEO was a mathematician is probably fairly rare, but I don’t think that this being an exception is an indictment on the various methods used to go from ideation to implementation. Edit to say: user stories in particular are as good or as bad as those involved in creating them are skilled and understanding of what is being requested, what is needed, etc. In my prior company we had an entire design team who took care of the UI/UX, and decoupled that (largely) from logic, implementation, platforms etc.
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- xcv123 3y ago> I feel for the above commenter. I cannot relate to their experiences as fulsomely. Not as bad as it sounds, when the requirements are provided at a high level. In a User Story the implementation details and software architecture are left to the developer.
- jofer 3y agoAnd interestingly, the product managers I've worked with who actually do understand the product and the users have generally either abhorred user stories or treated them as a meaningless checkbox.
- ngc248 3y agoYep, seems like everyone and their dog is getting into Product management nowadays. In our company, the product management org has ballooned and I see relatively inexperienced people becoming Senior Product manager etc, but the number of effective product managers is definitely less. A majority just act as glorified project managers, just shunting requirements from there to there and not adding anything to it.