Story-o-types: 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: production, analysis, cleanup, infrastructure/environment, business support, or other. Within each of these categories are different “story-o-types”-patterns that define the commonalities among the stories themselves. Dan defines and describes some of the most common story-o-types, explains why they are useful, and demonstrates the concept with examples including “Alternate Path” and “Clean-Up Interface” for the production category, “Talk to Stakeholders” and “Exploratory Testing” for the analysis category, among others. For each story-o-type, Dan provides sample tasks and canonical "doneness" criteria that make planning and backlog grooming easier and more consistent. By employing story-o-types in developing your stories, your team will produce more consistent, higher quality requirements that are easier to work with.