Agile stories are intentionally brief and not meant to be full specifications — they are invitations to a conversation. This post argues that the missing piece in most Agile implementations is the explicit, ongoing conversation between developers and subject matter experts (SMEs) that must happen before, during, and after development. The author, writing from an embedded systems perspective, explains why this conversation takes real, non-zero time and must be budgeted for by both developers and managers. A detailed topic checklist covers hardware, toolchains, APIs, concurrency, protocols, and more. The post also covers how to capture gathered knowledge through tests (unit and acceptance), documentation (Doxygen, PlantUML, ADRs, Markdown), and how to manage scope via story splitting and spikes — time-boxed research stories that make information-gathering explicit and trackable.
