User Stories, Improvement Stories, or Job Stories

My current team administers AWS access and IAM permissioning among other related responsibilities. Some of our (non-operational) stories do not fit well in the standard story template:

 [As a ] [I want to ] [So that

Searching I found a couple of good alternative templates depending on the context.

Job Stories

The job story removes the persona which often is not relevant or contrived for our security and architecture stories

[ When … ] [ I want to ] [So I can ]

‘When’ is focused on the situation, ‘I want to’ is focused on the motivation, and ‘So I can’ is focused on the outcome. See Job Stories Offer a Viable Alternative to User Stories by Mike Cohn and Designing features using Job Stories by Alan Klement for more details and examples.

Improvement Stories

User stories seem heavy for bug fixes and simple improvements. The Improvement Story template keeps it very simple

[ Currently ] [, we want ]

‘Currently’ is focussed on the way things are now, ‘we want’ is focussed on the desired new state. E.g. Currently the help link on the role change app is broken, we want the URL to point to . See Improvement Stories: a simple alternative to User Stories by Maarten Dalmijn for more details and examples.