3 ms·

How do we use or reference them? Should we have anti-epics and anti-user stories? Do we validate the anti-behaviors with rejection criteria?

codeduck 3y ago
what about user anti-stories? where do those fit in?
- antifa 3y ago
  To me, "User wants to do something we don't want them to do" sounds like it would be an safety/authorization/security/sales funnel story 99% of the time.
mortenjorck 3y ago
Perhaps you're being facetious, but this is actually kind of an interesting idea, at a high level. Probably not something to do in your regular sprint planning, but as a part of strategic discussions, maybe at an offsite, the idea of creating a few anti-epics to help build focus seems like it could have some value.
- cheschire 3y ago
  I was being facetious but only because I felt like the article felt like half a concept. I have some guesses about how it might work, and you've taken it another step further. But I was actually considering it as I wrote, thinking perhaps an anti-user story for a site like HN would be "As a sales person I want to astroturf interest in my company's product using puppet accounts so that I can generate sales." or "As a nation state I want to brigade topics that present my nation in a poor light." So yeah, facetious, but legitimately considering it too.
gavmor 3y ago
Yes! We should have anti-user stories! The only question is; how to index them when writing stories so that they're queried at the right juncture to abandon? Generally, we accrue these anti-stories as a sort of oral tradition, the classic example of which is "we tried that before, it didn't work." Any [junior] dev worth her salt will, when arriving on a team, start to question all the Chesterton's Fences strewn about the place. That's when we start reciting the anti-epics! Why not codify it? Admittedly, from my perspective, Chesterton's Fences are technical in nature, but I imagine analogous interactions occur at the product level.
- cheschire 3y ago
  Yep, there's plenty of business process level instances as well. They tend to be in the form of "pointless" meetings or other process steps that people feel are "bureaucratic gatekeeping". When creating line of business apps these chestertons fences can appear when a product owner does not fully understand the complexity they're supposed to be owning, and they remove / fail to capture critical validation steps in a process for the sake of efficiency.
phailhaus 3y ago
Anti-personas are used to give you grounds to reject work, not create it.
- M2Ys4U 3y ago
  Not necessarily. An anti-persona could highlight features that you need to introduce to prevent behaviour you don't want. As an example: An anti-persona could be "An abusive ex-partner who wants to harass another user of the program", and the new work to be created would be things like "adding the ability to block other users", or "adding visibility controls" etc.
marcosdumay 3y ago
Anti-scope has been in common use for decades already.

codeduck 3y ago

what about user anti-stories? where do those fit in?

antifa 3y ago
To me, "User wants to do something we don't want them to do" sounds like it would be an safety/authorization/security/sales funnel story 99% of the time.

mortenjorck 3y ago

Perhaps you're being facetious, but this is actually kind of an interesting idea, at a high level. Probably not something to do in your regular sprint planning, but as a part of strategic discussions, maybe at an offsite, the idea of creating a few anti-epics to help build focus seems like it could have some value.

cheschire 3y ago
I was being facetious but only because I felt like the article felt like half a concept. I have some guesses about how it might work, and you've taken it another step further. But I was actually considering it as I wrote, thinking perhaps an anti-user story for a site like HN would be "As a sales person I want to astroturf interest in my company's product using puppet accounts so that I can generate sales." or "As a nation state I want to brigade topics that present my nation in a poor light." So yeah, facetious, but legitimately considering it too.

gavmor 3y ago

Yes! We should have anti-user stories! The only question is; how to index them when writing stories so that they're queried at the right juncture to abandon? Generally, we accrue these anti-stories as a sort of oral tradition, the classic example of which is "we tried that before, it didn't work." Any [junior] dev worth her salt will, when arriving on a team, start to question all the Chesterton's Fences strewn about the place. That's when we start reciting the anti-epics! Why not codify it? Admittedly, from my perspective, Chesterton's Fences are technical in nature, but I imagine analogous interactions occur at the product level.

cheschire 3y ago
Yep, there's plenty of business process level instances as well. They tend to be in the form of "pointless" meetings or other process steps that people feel are "bureaucratic gatekeeping". When creating line of business apps these chestertons fences can appear when a product owner does not fully understand the complexity they're supposed to be owning, and they remove / fail to capture critical validation steps in a process for the sake of efficiency.

phailhaus 3y ago

Anti-personas are used to give you grounds to reject work, not create it.

M2Ys4U 3y ago
Not necessarily. An anti-persona could highlight features that you need to introduce to prevent behaviour you don't want. As an example: An anti-persona could be "An abusive ex-partner who wants to harass another user of the program", and the new work to be created would be things like "adding the ability to block other users", or "adding visibility controls" etc.

marcosdumay 3y ago

Anti-scope has been in common use for decades already.