What a User Story is and how to use it
User Stories are short but well-formed descriptions of some new feature or functionality told from the perspective of the person who needs it.
We write requirements like this to encourage us to think of the actual people that we're making something for; it helps us focus on the value that we're trying to create for them.
The User Story format
The following figure shows an example User Story that you may recognize from earlier in the book. There are three sections to it, shown as follows:
The basic template we're using for this User Story is:
- As an <actor> I want <some action> so that I get <some value>
We can either define the actor as an actual person, "Kimesha, a cinema-goer", or as a persona, "a Cinema-Goer." The subtle difference between the two is just the name "Kimesha", but this can be surprisingly humanizing. A real person like Kimesha is far easier to picture in our mind's eye, and so we're less likely to objectify our customer...
