Although not yet to the big project that I have coming up, I’ve had the opportunity to try out formal user stories for the first time for a project. Before this, I was using a method that mimicked Joel Spolsky’s painless functional specs. Most of this process I will maintain, except I’ve moved to the “As a (role) I want (something) so that (benefit).” user story format proposed by Mike Cohn in User Stories Applied. I find that using this format really does help me 1) write from the user perspective,...