##User Stories Today I had a chance to Introduce user stories and how they relate to software development as a whole, I thought I took a pretty innovative approach. I basically handed out 3 decks of cards that had a bunch of user stories on them without even mentioning what a user story is, then I had my class read the decks and pass them around. When it was over, I asked what did we just read? Someone said “A Narrative”, someone else said “A Story”. This was all coming from people who had never heard of User stories before this day!

I really wanted my class to understand 2 key concepts:

  • All of Software is just telling a story
  • A user story is the promise of a conversation

###Software as a story

Someone told me a while back that all of software is just crafting a user story, If the story is horrible it doesn’t matter how clean, fast, or well written your code is. Sure those things are great, but if you don’t have the story to draw users in then no one will ever see them.

I never believe in writing code just for the sake of writing code, I feel thats a meaningless exercise. Notice how I said “just for the sake of writing code”, I consider practicing and exploring new concepts in code as a completely different beast than just writing the same programs over and over again. Back to the point though, if you write code that doesn’t have a real purpose its never going to see the light of day.

Another to think of is how you’re contributing to mankind as a whole. If I write code that tells a relatable, well crafted narrative, I’ve created something meaningful and valuable. Even if it is only meaningful or valuable to a few people. It was Marx who said that the farther a worker is from the end result of their labor the more miserable they are, as Software developers we are in a key position to directly see the results of our labor minute by minute, hour by hour. We can see the story building up day by day.

In closing, Don’t just write code, craft a story!