If you’ve used certain agile variants in professional settings, you’ll be familiar with Scrum stories, the cards that follow the format “As a [type of user], I want to [an action/goal], so that [a benefit/value]“. According to the agile manifesto, it’s a helpful way to learn for what, and for whom, a story is on the board in the first place because it gives you a roundabout approximation of its motivations. It’s not a must, and many teams move past it once they’ve gotten used to their methodology and the team dynamics.

Others, however, not just continue using it, they use it everywhere, including in ticket titles in Jira. This practice not only leads to unnecessarily long titles for everything, it also means that everything starts with “As a…” and is sorted accordingly. There are a number of variations, of course. My current client, for example, uses “I want to…” but I’ve seen plenty of other variants.

It’s one thing to walk through a list of tickets in a backlog where items are presented as a table, as the rows are usually wide enough to reveal at least a part of the actual issue. But if you move to an electronic approximation of a Scrum board with three or more columns, you can easily end up with a view where every single card has an issue number followed by “As a User, I Want” because there’s not enough available space, which directly defeats the point of using a board to begin with.

In many cases, we are talking about experienced, senior developers, people who have been doing this for years. They’ll know each other and the mechanics of their sprints, and they’ll likely have worked through any number of them. In short, they should be able to move past the basics by now.

Then why aren’t they?