The importance of clear Agile story titles

John Carney
Aug 9, 2017 · 3 min read

A story with the following title recently landed in my team’s backlog:

Improve accessibility for login page

People are fond of saying that an Agile story is a “promise of a conversation,” but given a title like the above, your conversation could very well become a telephone game. What does “improve accessibility” mean? Chances are different people will take it to mean different things.

What does it mean for the user?

When crafting a story title, I try to imagine how it would be received by one of our users. For users who do not have a clear understanding of what accessibility means, the above title might as well be written in a foreign language. Worse, it can reinforce the sense that people with disabilities are mysterious “others.”

For users who rely on accessibility, the title raises many, many questions — have you fixed the colour contrast issues? How about that annoying tab order? Raising false expectations, even by omission, leads to disappointment and frustration. Imagine visiting the website after hearing about this change, hoping to find that some issue that has long impeded your use of the site had been resolved. Then you discover that there is no apparent change at all, much less anything that you might consider an improvement to accessibility. An experience like this would be yet another case of being treated as a second class citizen.

“But I’ve added the detail in the description”

You could argue that the story will always be accompanied by details explaining the exact nature of the story. However, it will not always be accompanied by this detail — on a story wall, for example, you would typically only see the title. Similarly, in a conversation it might be referred to as the “login page accessibility” story. Anyone not already familiar with the story will need it explained, or they will walk away with mistaken assumptions about the work being undertaken.

Even if the detail behind a story is readily available, it can omit crucial information, and not mention the user at all. Looking into the detail in this particular story, we learn that the intention is to add a lang attribute to the page’s html tag. Nowhere is there any mention of how adding a lang attribute to a page benefits the user.

Getting it right

It turns out that lang attributes are used by multilingual screen readers. With that knowledge, we can rewrite the title:

Ensure login page works with multilingual screen readers

For users who do not rely on accessibility, it is clear who benefits from the change and why. Users who rely on accessibility will understand that while this may not impact their experience, they can reasonably assume that work is being undertaken to address their needs.

Furthermore, we now have a concise way to describe the story in conversations during planning, development, and testing that carries little risk of miscommunication.


There is another benefit to crafting clear story titles: if you are struggling to come up with a concise title, it’s quite likely you are trying to describe a solution, or that you have more than one story.

John Carney

Written by

Ruby developer, amateur photographer.

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