Telling Stories

Ideas by Jevon @ 5:43 am

“User Stories” are nothing new in the world of software design. The iterative and detailed “stories” that they tell have been used mostly by Extreme Programmers for a long time now. Ideally, the customer would write these stories. A few sentences to describe what the software should do for them in some situation, and more often then now, we would use that story to hash out how long it would take us to implement this requirement. Usually culminating in 5-8 pages of additional documentations and graphs.

Building and designing Firestoker has been different. We have decided to write Stories About Users. Each interaction, or goal, is a chapter in a real story that explores the implications of each feature. From social, organizational, policy and personal points of view, our hope is to find out what components and features of our software will really make a difference to the user, and when we have them in a story format, they are much easier to share with others outside of our organization. The Story was the first standard humans have every created, and we remain fully standards compliant.

I will start to post some of our Stories About Users here as they are ready for mass consumption.