User Storade

In the grand ballrooms of software development, there exists a dance of deception known as the User Storade, where implementation tasks, masquerading as user stories, elegantly weave up and down, in and out of backlogs. All the while, teams sway mindlessly to the haunting melodies of faux agility.

---

Because I'm (mostly) paid to solve problems, and, much like other human beings, I'm not free from a negativity bias, I'm particularly drawn to patterns of organizational dysfunction.

One such pattern that I find particularly amusing is the User Storade.

Just as in the masquerades of old, where nobility concealed their identities behind ornate masks, in the User Storade, non-functional requirements and implementation tasks hide their true nature beneath the veil of the Connextra format:

As an engineer, I want to provision a Kubernetes cluster to deploy containerized applications.

As a user, I want developers to write unit tests for the checkout module so that the checkout process is reliable.

As the system, I want to keep session data in an in-memory data store to improve response times.

Masks enchant and beguile. Teams partaking in the Storade, lost in a choreography learned by rote, mistake the elegance of the story template for actual business value. As the dance continues, they estimate, schedule, and execute work with little to no regard for real users, whose voices are drowned amidst a cacophony of misdirected goals and priorities.