User Stories are representations of a conversation, not a list of requirements!

Great post by Martin Fowler about a hidden aspect of the User Story flow within a team. 

Many times I see teams that expect the Product Owner to behave just like a Requirements manager did in the past. Come up with the content, put it in the tool and stay out of the way! That’s wrong!

In this article Fowler calls our attention to a key aspect of Agile SW development: the fact that it is a constantly ongoing conversation between the team (that implements) and the person/people that hold the product’s vision (typically: product owner):

This notion of product owners coming up with DecreedStories is a profound misunderstanding of the way agile development should work. When we were brainstorming names at Snowbird, I remember Kent suggesting “conversational”. This emphasized the fact that the heart of our thinking was of an on-going conversation between customers and developers about how a development project should proceed.

Photo credit: jakuza @ flick