system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Should I require operations/entity design for my user stories?

Hey community. I am a .net programmer currently working in a 5-man backend team in a medium-sized project and I am constantly having to refactor big chunks of the application because of (what I believe to be) a lack of pre-development design. 

We receive user stories that only contain a functional analysis on a front-end level with just a description of the fields and what they represent, nothing more. We never got any form of documented model, no DSD, DCD, DER, no anything. This resulted in all the application being developed towards whatever feature is in this sprint without minding for previous/future features. We have endless endpoints that update only one entity or field, repeated Domain Classes all over the place, and this is all even worse because this is being done in a microservices architecture.

I respect my tech lead a lot, and he has done a great work as a leader in all other areas but he is not a senior in any way, he landed the job after our previous lead quit the company 1 week before the development started. He insists that doing that layer of design is our team's responsability, yet we get no time to attend to that and we have never done it.

 What I wander is: 

Is designing the classes/database entities a backend responsability? 

Should I raise this to my superiors, bypassing my TL?

Whenever I think of asking this work to be done by the design team I am afraid to be asking for too much, but I also feel that without help from an area with application-wide visibility the refactors that will be needed in a later moment will be impossible.
gpt
Your user is not expected to know technical details about the underlying system. It is _your teams job_ to do this analysis (and documentation!) in the PBR. And it is also your teams job to define criteria when they consider a story ready for sprint, so if you say you need certain things in your story before you can work on it, that should definitely go into your story checklist which needs to be worked through before you estimate.