Login Is Not A User Story

A periodic reminder that Login is not a user story. (And no, putting it into that ridiculous Connextra format "as a user I want to log in" does not magically transform it into one. Putting it on a ticket doesn't transform it into a story, either.)

First of all, there's that "as a user." What kind of user? Admin? Customer? Player? Client? Manager? If you're using "user," you may as well say "average bozo walking down the street." It means nothing. I want to know the role the person takes on in the domain while performing a domain-level task.

Second, and more importantly, a "user story" is literally the user's story. It's the story of a person in some domain-level role performing some domain-level task that's valuable to them. What intent did your user have when they walked up to the computer? Nobody sits down with the intent of logging in, pats themselves on the back for a job well done, then calls it a day and goes home. Logging in is an (annoying) task you have to do on the way to doing real work. It's that real work that's the user's story. Login is an irrelevant implementation detail.

The entire point of working with user stories is to guarantee that everything we develop provides value to the user. A faux story that describes a programmer's task does not do that.

Finally, the first pass at implementing the story might not need a login at all. Implementing login for real is a huge can of worms—you need to create accounts, etc., first. If you have only five users, you can probably either skip the login entirely or use something easy like .htaccess. You can also probably skip the "account" setup for five users. Just enter the password manually or assign one to them. In any event, implementing login is your work, not your user's. The user's story describes your user's work, not yours.