On 02/26/2016 01:29 PM, Bryan Richter wrote: > Yesterday while fleshing out user stories, the question came up of > whether or not user stories can capture everything, or whether some > information should be deferred to specs. > > In my opinion, separate specifications are needed because user stories > only capture features. It is not a user story that users have unique > ids in the database, to name a trivial example. Perhaps I should list > a more interesting example: It is not a user story that a single, > reusable library handles all alerts for the system. Stories will talk > about *specific* alerts, or even possibly about features of alerts in > aggregate, but they will never say "alerts are handled by src/Alert.hs > which exports the following symbols: ..." > > If I'm just arguing semantics let me know. > > It's certainly possible that all *site features* can be captured in user > stories alone. > >
I think the point is that the existence of features and specs should be, ideally, justified by user stories. In a silly sense, a story for the alert backend could be one with the subject as a developer. Really, I think specs make total sense as something additional and separate from user stories, but we should ideally have references in the specs to the user story source of things that do relate to user stories. Broadly, we should use whatever organizing approaches successfully lead us to MVP and not be dogmatic. We should not make specs that don't help us reach MVP. We shouldn't get into obsessive organizing in pursuit of some perfect structure where nothing is at all ambiguous. But neither should we reject the writing down of specs, plans, whatever in whatever form is clearly helping us progress. We should recognize all of this as sets of tools and use the best tools whenever appropriate, just never solely because of some dogma about the tools.
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