In order to ...

Lately I've been doing some story generation for a few projects, and I've really been focusing on the idea of putting value first.

Its a subtle, but powerful idea. I was introduced to it by Dan North during his tutorial on BDD at QCon London 2009 and it really clicked.

I've been doing quite a bit of process work involving Kanban, which really focuses on value - so it has a kind of synergy (pardon me while I wash my mouth out for using management speak). Liz Keogh also wrote a good article for InfoQ recently on Kanban and BDD.

So the format we've chosen is the same Liz describes in her article:

In order to ...
As a ...
I want ...

And its working really well so far. By putting the value first it makes more sense to our domain experts, who typically being non-technical in most cases got stuck on "As a", and "I want". And we've found that we keep our scope better contained as people stop thinking about "I want" and concentrate on the end value of "In order to".

So if you are working on stories I would really encourage you to try this one simple change. Hopefully you'll see the benefits.