User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development

Chapter 3. User Role Modeling

On many projects, stories are written as though there is only one type of user. All stories are written from the perspective of that user type. This simplification is a fallacy and can lead a team to miss stories for users who do not fit the general mold of the system’s primary user type. The disciplines of usage-centered design (Constantine and Lockwood 1999) and interaction design (Cooper 1999) teach us the benefits of identifying user roles and personas prior to writing stories. In this chapter we will look at user roles, role modeling, user role maps, and personas and show how taking these initial steps leads to better stories and better software.

User Roles^[1]

Suppose we are building the BigMoneyJobs job posting ...