[another-dave]

The point of the "narrative statement" is to show what value implementing a story will bring to help bring a relative priority order to things. Otherwise people keep championing their pet features, without focusing on _what's the point_ of this feature.

"As a user, I want to be able to find the full version number of the product to make it easier to get help when raising support requests".

This is now something we can argue about — is this story bringing more or less value than, e.g. setting reminders or 2FA?

If you write the narrative statements in a banal or glib way, just for the sake of them, then of course there's no point, but that's true of most processes — e.g. JavaDocs are a good idea in principle, but you can make them equally useless: "return Boolean: true or false".

[jbreckmckye]

Why not just write,

"We want to add the software version number to the dialog. We think they will then cite this when they raise tickets"

?

At least in this form, you can expand on the context and justify it in depth.

Also, user stories often phrase the context as a given when it's really not. In your example, it's an implicit premise that a version number may help. In mine, the writer admits scepticism and therefore invites the programmer to think up some better solution.

[another-dave]

IMO, the format is meant to do two things:

* By having a premise, it forces you to question its validity up front (before any development work is done), getting rid of ambiguities early and having a shared understanding between business and technical team members (rather than the developer implementing what they think is a better solution, the product owner being unhappy with the outcome & only finding this out at the end).

* Using the format of "As a <type of user>, I want to <use a feature>, so that I can <achieve some value>" forces you to think about what user (customer/website editor/back office) gets what specific value (faster/cheaper/less error prone) from implementing some feature. By following the same pattern it makes it easier to compare unrelated areas.

I don't think the format is sacrosanct, but it's like any constraint you put on yourself (e.g. coding conventions) — if you find it hard to make a story work in that format, it's an indication that it may not be properly understood it really bringing value.