Death by User Story

User Stories are a universally adopted technique for agile teams. They represent the customer requirements and create flexibility advantage, foster change and help mitigate risk, enhance communication in the team and in the company. Moreover, they are easy to create and refactor and provides a live overview of the product unfolding. Is it me or it sounds like the amazing drugs commercials with a lot of small print! Many companies in their quest of becoming faster and better have had negative consequences from their user stories practice: wasted time and effort, rework and bugs and, ultimately, failure, disappointed customers and financial losses. They face resistance to change, little or no communication, frustration builds and confidence in the use of user story and ultimately in their ability to be agile is heavily reduced. In this talk we are going to explore the pitfalls of user stories and discuss practices and techniques for improving the shared understanding needed between business people and development teams. We are going to tackle concerns that trouble many agile teams: How do I start writing user stories? How much should be written and by whom? How do we ensure we have a correct overview over the product unfolding? How do we keep the consistency and quality of our product?