Thank you for inviting me to present with you. I was honored to do it. I hope that more people/organizations discover the benefits of DbFit by trying it themselves.

Regarding: “I attended quite a few sessions on acceptance testing and user stories and I’ve seen people advocate a particular format of writing user stories and bashing other formats, as if a format change would really make an important difference for the project.”

I actually attended the User Story Panel. While all panelists did mention the particular style/format that they typically use for user stories, all stressed that the user stories were a starting point for communication between the delivery team/business. I quite liked David Hussman’s comment (he was a panelist – and I’m paraphrasing) that the user story is a tool to get everyone talking about acceptance tests.

Anyway, I do share your distaste for tool vendors/”experts”/whomever imposing imaginary process and formatting rules on Agile teams. I think this is why I enjoyed all of the Questioning Agile presentations so much…in my opinion, we cannot measure “how Agile” we are or run-down a checklist to see if our organization is indeed “Agile.”

Thanks for your post.

Marisa