Why stories matter

Discussions between business and data/technology teams are often chaotic — full of details about screen designs, database schemas, existing capabilities of legacy systems — all while forgetting to capture what is really important: what is the use case and what are the stories?

Not your typical Agile story

In Agile practice, "user stories" have rarely lived up to their promise. More often than not they are just tasks — something to finish in a sprint and then forget about. In the Use Case Tree Method, stories are fundamentally different: they are the atomic building blocks of entire use cases and applications. A story is never "done and forgotten." It lives for as long as the capability it describes is needed, continuously tested, always traceable — making the composable business possible.

Stories cut through that noise. They reduce requirements to their core — expressed in plain language, stripped of implementation detail — so that business and technology teams can agree on what needs to be delivered. That agreement works almost like a contract: delivery reports back in the same agreed terms, from start to finish, with no surprises.

Focus on what matters

Stories provide a bridge between business needs and technical implementation. They ensure that:

• Business language is preserved — Requirements are captured in terms the business understands
• Focus stays on outcomes — We understand the "why" behind each requirement
• Everyone is aligned — Business, data, and technology teams share a common understanding of what needs to be delivered

Strategic focus

Have a more strategic view on which functionality is really required. By focusing on business outcomes rather than implementation details, we can identify what truly matters.

Gap analysis

Allow seeing "the disconnect" or "the gap" between what's required and what is currently available, delivered, and deliverable. This helps prioritize work and identify areas where new capabilities are needed.

Avoid tunnel thinking

Avoid "tunnel thinking" where everyone, especially "the business" itself, makes all kinds of assumptions that may or may not be true and could severely diminish creativity. Stories encourage thinking beyond current constraints.

Separation of concerns

Create a clear separation of concerns: the business specifies what they need but leaves it to the data and technology people to work out how they can deliver it. So no more "screen designs" (that comes later) or "schemas" that are used as "functional specification". We need to be able to go deeper, to the core questions about "what do you really need?" (and forget about the "How" for a minute).

Testable specifications

Have clear testable specifications of required functionality for the whole lifecycle of a given user story. As long as people need a given story to be implemented, it will continuously be tested "end-to-end," from inception all the way to production, not only before deployment into production but actually also in production itself.