The Role of the Story Master: A Case Study of the Cognitive Load of Story Management Tasks

Agile software development methods allow design teams to respond quickly to changing circumstances. Much of this flexibility is achieved through increased involvement of the customer who becomes responsible for the development of the specifications of the software and the communication of these requirements to the developers. Reports have shown that the customer is often overloaded in the role. We discuss the customer's role in terms of cognitive effort and find that much of this effort performed by the customer can be performed by someone else. We explore this possibility through the experiences of two individuals in the "story master" role, a role created as part of a complex software project, as an assistant to the customer. We present the evidence from the case study as a set of tasks performed by the role which reduce cognitive effort. We evaluate the role's success as an Agile Information Systems Development component using Conboy's [1] framework.