User Stories - Don't Confuse Action With Intent!
Tyler Blain has an excellent article out on how to write user stories. The key takeaways are Don’t confuse action with intent Don’t use user stories to explain how the problem should be solved. Use them to explain why the problem should be solved Note: Action - How (the specific steps you take) to do something Intent - What it is that you are actually trying to accomplish The case being considered is an SMS group chat, where one of the participants is just a phone number (i.e., not in your contacts list) Simple (and wrong) user story - As a participant in an SMS conversation, I want to be able to add unidentified people to my contact list . <--- This is classic "how to solve the problem" thinking. Better (and still wrong) - As a participant in an SMS conversation, I want to be able to add unidentified people to my contact list so that I can keep my contact list current. <--- This is better, but still “how to solve the problem” ...