Joseph Wilk

Joseph Wilk

Things with code, creativity and computation.

Story Smells: In Order to Do X I Want X

I keep coming across story cards written like this:

This is usually a tell tale sign that the why stack was not popped. The value (In order to ) has been written at the lowest possible level of abstraction, the same as the feature (I want ). The card does not tell us why this feature is being built.

If you find yourself writing cards like this take it as a chance to find out a bit more about why you are adding this feature. Hopefully you will uncover a more meaningful value that you can write on the card or perhaps discover that you don’t really need this feature after all.

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