This is a quick follow-up to the earlier post, When Writing a User Story, Always Start with the User Persona.

The post was about a pseudo-user story (“as an application, I want to invoke an API to get grades from a course”) and two real stories that replaced it

Identifying the user personas made a big difference, of course.

But it is also worth noting that the original story existed only in the form of electronic entry, while the two “real” stories were written originally on index cards. The two stories soon went separate ways. The “teacher” story remained alone, while the “student” story soon joined another student-centric grade story (also written on an index card!). It may still join another couple of stories sitting next to it on the backlog card wall. Such backlog reorganization was never possible with the electronic “as-an-application” “story.”

Writing these stories on index cards made a very important difference.