give names to stories

Thanks for the suggestion.

I have a suggestion for a slight alternative. What if, instead of a name or title,we had a way to mark part of the story with some markup, and that becomes the title?

Pur team typically underlines the most important two or three words in a story on a physical card. For example:

As a user of X, I want a graphical test runner so that I can blah blah blah

("graphical test runner" is underlined when I type this, but it's not showing up when I click save...)

What if you allowed me to write a story like this:

As a user of X, I want a *graphical test runner* so that I can blah blah blah

... and then you bold everything between the *'s, and use that as the title. This cuts down on redundant data entry yet still makes it possible to have a short description for a longer story.

Hi Bryan

Why not have the option to allow admins to add custom fields.  Keep the main fields, but allow the option for two custom fields.  We also use Title's to identify the process for that user story. 

Unfortunately custom fields are really quite difficult.  We would need to reconsider the entire interface to allow these custom fields, and at present I find it hard to find a space where they could go without reverting to an interface where some of the content is in fact hidden behind a dialog box.  We'll give this some thought, but unfortunately not many people have asked for custom fields so it's not high on the priority list.

Hi Matthew! Here is my answer to "what are titles needed for.

I love how easy you guys make it to enter user stories and I like having my backlog items as user stories. but the user stories are difficult to scan. Some of that is our fault as we're new to user stories but we spend a lot of time in our stand-ups  looking at the posted stories and asking "which one is that?" 

Having a title (which we're currently putting in the description field) would remove the mental conversion of "As a content manager I want to have social media links on the home page so I can promote our social media participation" to "Add social media links to footer".

Of course our particular use case could be solved by tasks too since we could save the plain language for the tasks and leave the stories more general.

Thanks for your input Sunshine.  We will certainly consider how to incorporate this moving forwards as we plan further development of easyBacklog.  I understand why this is needed for some people and why it would be useful.

I would like to echo the other comments for the need of this feature.  Having been an eXtreme Programming style agile practitioner for over a dozen years, I find the lack of a "User Story Headline" to be almost a showstopper for using your otherwise outstanding service.

All the other features that look like additional fields to user stories can be argued as more or less critical depending, on one's particular flavor of agile; however, the "headline" idea, in addition to the user story ID, is what enables most conversations around a user story to have a context.  It's the name we use to "hang the conversation" on -- I hope that makes some sense.

I love how ID's can be converted by changing the prefix for the theme.  I love how the tabbed completion mechanism streamlines the ability to write a story fast.  Basically, I love it all.  I the only hitch is the lack of headlines.

One more side comment.  With the addition of a headline field, quite a few of the other suggested features could have work arounds by simply following an convention in the headline usage.  For example, suppose one has a client that needs an "epic" identifier for some cross section of stories, a story headline might be "[EPIC: Security] New security role for team-leads" and so on.

Thanks for create a great product.

To me, having a separate name for a user story is a "smell." It may mean that the user story is too complex and needs to be broken up.

On the other hand, there is clearly a need for being able to easily scan the titles of stories. One idea I had was to reformat the user story structure into just ROLE + "wants to " + WANTTO onto a single line.