User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development

Chapter 5. Working with User Proxies

It is vital that a project include one or more real users on the customer team. While others may be able to guess at how a user wants the software to behave, only a real user knows. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to get the users we need. For example, we might be developing a shrinkwrap product with users across the country but be unable to bring one (or more) of them onsite with us to write the stories. Or we might be writing software that will be used within our company, but someone tells us we cannot talk to the users. When we cannot get as many users as we want to represent different perspectives of the product, we need to resort to user proxies, who may not be users themselves but are on a project ...