User Stories considered harmful: why Product Owners and developers failed at gathering requirements and communication

Room 4

Long time ago there was a role of a business analyst, who would discover and gather client requirements, then together with a system analysts, write them down. Next, they would meet an architect, where they would analyse the impact of those requirements on the architecture, and impact of architecture on business opportunities. This collaboration would provide new ideas for the business, but most of all, would create the analysis that went to developers.

Then there was the famous C3 project with Kent Beck as the leader. There was no time for formalities, so a new method was born, called eXtreme Programming (XP).

Then came Scrum and Kanban with Scrum Masters and Product Owners. Neither of them had any experience with XP, but since they loathed the old world, they have fired all the system and business analysts.

And so, two working methods of requirement analysis were replaced by a single ineffective meeting called "grooming", where a seven plus/minus three people, without any preparation, try to estimate something that nobody took time to understand.

I'd like to show you how we came to this point, why the current situation puts developers in jail, and how to solve this madness.