“As a system I want to have a security certificate to connect to data source x”
If your organization leverages user story syntax carte blanche, you have probably seen this sort of nonsense. A dogmatic application of user stories across all types, scales, and phases of work inevitably creates this descent into absurdity in which a ‘system’ is a user. Human users should not and do not need to care about security certificates; but to load data onto the page or dashboard they do care about, someone needs to install that certificate.
Used correctly, the narrative structure of user stories create clear requirements for high-level user needs, but attempting to use them as the primary vehicle for all development tasks and requirements misaligns with the diverse needs of software development stakeholders. User stories should be reserved for describing feature-level requirements, with more granular implementation details handled through alternative approaches.
The Stakeholder Information Gap
Modern software development involves multiple stakeholders who each require fundamentally different information from requirements documentation. Business stakeholders need estimates for feature completion, advance warning of delays, and clear visibility into what has been released. Software engineers require constrained scope definitions, detailed acceptance criteria, user context for validation, and sufficient technical detail for accurate estimation. Design teams need user needs analysis, review specifications, and change details to verify correctness. Quality assurance teams require comprehensive change descriptions, implementation intentions, and feature completion criteria.
The traditional user story format—”As a [user], I want [goal] so that [benefit]”— cannot accommodate this breadth of information needs. When teams attempt to force all stakeholder requirements into this single format, the result is either oversimplified stories that lack implementation detail or bloated narratives that lose their user focus. This fundamental mismatch between format and information needs creates confusion, duplicate documentation, and inefficient communication across teams.
The Granularity Problem
One of the most significant issues with user stories emerges when teams attempt to break them down to their smallest deliverable components. The commonly cited advice to “break them down into the smallest chunk of customer value” quickly reveals its limitations in practice. Consider the example of a homepage user story: while it’s possible to decompose this into headers, menu structures, and individual menu items, these components provide no independent customer value. A header without content, navigation without destinations, or menu items without functionality cannot be meaningfully released to users.
This granularity problem forces teams into an uncomfortable choice between stories that are too large to estimate and implement effectively, or artificially small stories that abandon any pretense of delivering customer value. The result is a backlog filled with interdependent stories that cannot be prioritized, estimated, or delivered independently—defeating the core purpose of the user story approach.
Implementation Misalignment
The disconnect between user stories and actual development work becomes most apparent when examining the primary unit of software change: the pull request. User stories rarely correlate directly to individual pull requests. Most feature work requires interconnected code changes across different system components, more focused changes for testability, or smaller changes to enable effective review processes. When teams attempt to align user stories with these implementation needs, they inevitably split stories into smaller pieces, creating a cascade of problems.
Story splitting generates duplicate and overlapping entries in the backlog, making it unclear which stories address which underlying problems. Progress tracking becomes fragmented across multiple story locations, and the original user story syntax becomes irrelevant noise rather than helpful structure. Most critically, split stories often make no sense to actual users and cannot be meaningfully verified by quality assurance teams, as they represent technical implementation details rather than user-facing functionality.
The Appropriate Role for User Stories
Despite these limitations, user stories retain significant value when applied appropriately. They excel at maintaining user focus during requirements gathering, explicitly identifying user roles and contexts, and providing structured templates for capturing high-level feature needs. Their narrative format helps teams understand the “why” behind feature requests and facilitates productive discussions about user value and business objectives.
However, these benefits are maximized when user stories remain at the feature level—describing complete, user-facing capabilities that can be independently delivered and evaluated. At this level, the story format provides valuable context for development teams while remaining comprehensible to business stakeholders and end users.
| Stakeholder | Needs | Format Example |
|---|---|---|
| Business | Timeline, Release Info |
Summary / Epic |
| Engineer | Constraints, Acceptance Criteria |
Problem Stories, Job Stories, Improvement Stories |
| Designer | User Context, UX Specs |
User Story, Behavior Driven, Job Stories |
| QA | Detailed Change Intent, Test Criteria | Behavior Driven, Improvement Stories |
A Better Approach
The user story approach clearly communicates the user’s needs and intentions for feature level requirements. There are more appropriate formats for implementation stories which offer clear acceptance criteria, implementation detail, and with some discipline the reason behind the change. Some options are job stories ( When <situation>, I want <motivation> so that <outcome> ), problem stories ( In order to < solve problem>, we will <build solution> ), improvement stories ( we have <current situation >, we want to have <desired situation>), or behavior driven requirements ( given-when-then).
A hybrid approach allows each requirement type to use the most appropriate format while maintaining clear traceability between feature-level user stories and their supporting implementation work. Teams gain the user focus benefits of stories for features while avoiding the communication breakdowns and process inefficiencies that arise from forcing all requirements into a single narrative format.
User stories represent a valuable tool for capturing feature requirements, but attempting to use them as a universal solution for all development needs creates more problems than it solves. By restricting their use to feature-level descriptions and employing more appropriate formats for implementation details, teams can maintain user focus while supporting the diverse information needs of all development stakeholders.
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Can’t disagree more. You introduced a term as the solution for which there’s no widely accepted definition…feature. What’s a feature? Is “I’d like an app that will keep track of my daily calories” a feature? How about “I’d like the data to be sorted in alphabetical order?” What you call a Feature I call a User Story. They just differ in size. We only use the term Feature because the tools we use to collect requirements, i.e., Rally, Azure DevOps and Jira, all use them to help us organize user stories and, thus, people think they’re required in order to create user stories. I wish the term went away entirely. We have small, medium, large and really big user stories. That’s it. So much simpler. The standard user story format works for all sizes. So then it’s simply a matter of determining the size in order to get fast feedback.