I’ve been working with a team for a while now who use XP.   Writing user stories is OK and they are written very well, but writing developer stories posed a few problems.

The problem was this :-

We had a tendency, to actually write the story in such a way that presented the solution rather then the problem, and this seemed to cause problems and confusion.

Example of writing a bad developer story :-

As a developer I want to create a script that will run all DB scripts in succession so that I can easily refresh my development DB.

As you can see the solution is already presented in the story, not good.  This is mainly because it’s not giving the development team the wiggle room to come up with a solution.  The thing is the developer who wrote is giving his/her own take on the solution without consulting the rest of the team, thus not allowing for other team members, who might have a better solution, to present their contribution in the planning game.

So, what we need is to re-write the developer story in such a way that gives the team to reach a consensus on what is the best solution.

As a developer I want to address the issue of deploying the latest DB to my development DB with the minimum of fuss, so that I can start work sooner.

This is much better because it talks about the problem rather than the solution.  Now, you might be saying that “Isn’t it how you write stories anyway?” and you’ll be right from a customer’s story writing point of view, but I think as with my team of developers, we know a little bit more about the system, which influences our story writing towards a solution rather than describing the problem.