User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development Author: Mike Cohn | Language: English | ISBN:
B0054KOL74 | Format: PDF
User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development Description
This is the eBook version of the printed book.
Agile requirements: discovering what your users really want. With this book, you will learn to:
Flexible, quick and practical requirements that work
Save time and develop better software that meets users' needs
Gathering user stories -- even when you can't talk to users
How user stories work, and how they differ from use cases, scenarios, and traditional requirements
Leveraging user stories as part of planning, scheduling, estimating, and testing
Ideal for Extreme Programming, Scrum, or any other agile methodology----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thoroughly reviewed and eagerly anticipated by the agile community, User Stories Applied offers a requirements process that saves time, eliminates rework, and leads directly to better software.
The best way to build software that meets users' needs is to begin with "user stories": simple, clear, brief descriptions of functionality that will be valuable to real users. In User Stories Applied, Mike Cohn provides you with a front-to-back blueprint for writing these user stories and weaving them into your development lifecycle.
You'll learn what makes a great user story, and what makes a bad one. You'll discover practical ways to gather user stories, even when you can't speak with your users. Then, once you've compiled your user stories, Cohn shows how to organize them, prioritize them, and use them for planning, management, and testing.
User role modeling: understanding what users have in common, and where they differ
Gathering stories: user interviewing, questionnaires, observation, and workshops
Working with managers, trainers, salespeople and other "proxies"
Writing user stories for acceptance testing
Using stories to prioritize, set schedules, and estimate release costs
Includes end-of-chapter practice questions and exercises
User Stories Applied will be invaluable to every software developer, tester, analyst, and manager working with any agile method: XP, Scrum... or even your own home-grown approach.
ADDISON-WESLEY PROFESSIONAL
Boston, MA 02116
ISBN: 0-321-20568-5
- File Size: 2119 KB
- Print Length: 304 pages
- Simultaneous Device Usage: Up to 5 simultaneous devices, per publisher limits
- Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (March 1, 2004)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0054KOL74
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #26,828 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Computers & Technology > Programming > Software Design > Software Development - #60
in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Software Design, Testing & Engineering > Software Development
- #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Computers & Technology > Programming > Software Design > Software Development - #60
in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Software Design, Testing & Engineering > Software Development
'User Stories Applied' was a book that long stood on my Amazon wish list with a 'must have' rating. I'm not disappointed. I loved the book. Now let me explain why.
First of all, running the planning aspect of an XP project, for example, well is essential for reaping the benefits of agile software development. Yet, relatively little has been written to guide practitioners in doing that. I, for example, have made all the mistakes Cohn enumerates in the chapters for guiding the user towards writing *good* user stories (usually more than once). These sorts of things make you realize you shouldn't put the book on the shelf to gather dust! The author doesn't cover just writing good user stories, but the whole spectrum from putting together the customer team to estimating stories to discussing the stories to writing acceptance tests for the stories.
Second, it's a pleasure to read. The structure makes sense, each chapter is followed by a useful summary, and there's a set of questions -- along with answers -- to make sure you understood what the chapter talked about. Usually these kinds of Q&A sections simply force me to skip them over. The questions in this book did not. I read each and every one of them and I think there was only one set of questions that I did 'pass' with the first try, usually having forgotten some rather important aspects to consider (concrete evidence of their usefulness to me). To finish, the last part of the book, an example project, nicely ties together all the threads.
As usual, there were some things I experienced not so well. I believe the chapter on applying user stories with Scrum could've been left out without breaking the plot.
Writing user stories is one of the twelve practices of the XP software development methodology. User stories summarily describe features of the software that must be developed, from the point of view of the user. This means that no implementation detail is present on stories.
As with all the XP practices, the emphasis is on traveling light, producing only those artifacts that are absolutely necessary. Thus, user stories contain a brief description of the feature as a reminder, to the developers and to the customer, that sometime in the future they will need to meet and flesh out the details. This is in contrast to techniques like use cases, which might seem similar but are much more formal and rich.
User stories also play a fundamental role in the planning game, one of the other XP practices. During the planning game, the development team and the customer together discuss the stories, the developers estimate the time necessary to implement each story, in terms of story points and the customer prioritizes them. During the next iteration, developers will implement those stories that the customer deemed more urgent, up to a number whose total sum of points does not exceed the estimated team velocity.
All of this is explained in a couple of the XP series books, namely Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change and Planning Extreme Programming You'd better have already read at least the former of those before picking up Mike Cohn's book.
User Stories Applied does a good job explaining in detail what user stories are, what goes into them -and what doesn't -, how they should be estimated and what to do with them after the stories have been implemented.
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