Every day, Scrum teams do a 15 minute standup during which they describe to their team how they've spent their development time. I've noticed that teams which have been coached to use the "as a user" format of stories (credited to Rachel Davies & Tim Mackinnon, promulgated by Mike Cohen and many others including my self), create an impediment by giving their stories ID numbers instead of titles. "I worked on client authentication" turns into "I worked on story 6933," and most of the team doesn't know what this is and often just lets the information fly overhead. Even if they were familiar with 6933, there is less information and more abstraction when assigning numbers, and it's hard to feel an emotional attachment when sharing this number to people ancillary to the team, such as stake holders or perhaps the product owner. These story serial numbers become an impediment to communication.
For a while I coached teams to save that first line for the story title. It's easy to forget though and violates the principle of "once and only once" since the
WHAT I WANT
so ROLE can BUSINESS VALUE
For example:
Give it a try, and tell me what you think. I'd love to here your comments. Let's not try to describe Animal Farm by giving it some meaningless number, unless we're talking about 1984.
Nice alternative. I like having the title at the top of the card. It gets right to the point rather than having to get to the middle of the sentence. I will share this with my team and let you know how it goes. Thanks for sharing your experience.
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