Storyotypes: The Patterns Within the Stories

Have you noticed that similar stories appear over and over again as you develop a system? According to Dan Rawsthorne, stories-those small chunks of work that make up your backlog and provide demonstrable value to the project-can be categorized by purpose as: Production, Analysis, Cleanup, Infrastructure/Environment, Business Support, or Other. Within each of these categories are different "storyotypes"-patterns that define the commonalities among the stories themselves. Dan defines and describes some of the most prevalent storyotypes, explains why they are useful, and demonstrates the concept with examples. These examples include "Alternate Path" and "Clean-Up Interface" for the production category, "Talk to Stakeholders" and "Exploratory Testing" for the analysis category, among others. For each storyotype, Dan provides sample tasks and canonical "doneness" criteria that make planning and backlog grooming easier and more consistent. By employing storyotypes in developing your stories, your team will produce more consistent, higher quality requirements that are easier to work with.