Writing User Stories

As the first task doing XP we've started writing user stories for our project. We've decided to use the “As a , I want so that ” story template after reading this post by Mike Cohn. We consider the so-that clause required though, since we think it ads a alot of value to think about why we do things - we have allready removed one of the features we had planned after challenging it with that question.

Yes, we have planned features. Actually the entire project is planned up front, which is another challenge for this project. It was preceded by a pre-study and the picture about what should be done is pretty clear to us allready. Our interaction designer and our project manager have spent alot of time with the customer to get this picture, which we know is not very XP-like. The good thing is that these two internal persons have so good understanding about the product that they can act as the on-site customer that we can't have for real.