In this Coffee Talk, we had the pleasure of talking to Luis Antonio Salazar, AKA Lucho Salazar. He is the official Spanish translator of the Scrum Guide and the official Nexus Guide. He is also co-author of the book User Stories: A pragmatic view.

Thanks to stories and storytelling, cultures become stronger and survive. User stories are a way of narrating a product or users' experience. User stories are a form of communication and a way of recording, remembering, and elaborating the results of a conversation.

User stories establish a way to organize and communicate experiences to understand what the users want fully. They must generate value for the user, an impact, a return on investment, a great benefit.

Lucho Salazar explains the 3 C's (Card, Conversation, Confirmation) and even mentions a 4th C (Context). He also goes over what it means to have good user stories (INVEST), which helps us create a culture of good use of this tool.

Although user stories were created in the late 90s, there is still a lot of bad practice. One of them is to believe user stories are for writing only and use only one format.

User stories should be used for teaching, simulation, creation, and implementation of everything related to the product to be built. In case of doubt, the agile manifesto should always be reviewed. We must experiment, use user stories in different ways. Thanks to experimentation, Lucho created the User Story Coversation Canvas tool to generate conversation around user stores.

Lucho explains how user stories help the Scrum team during refinement and Sprint Planning.