User Stories Applied
For Agile Software Development
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- 529,00 kr
Publisher Description
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.
Customer Reviews
Decent Introduction to User Stories
User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development is a decent introduction to user stories. The book could have benefitted from more depth on user stories and a little less breadth on adjoining topics. It is from 2004 and is starting to show its age.
The user story is a frequently used tool in agile software development methods such as eXtreme Programming (XP) and Scrum. It is used both for documenting the existence of a requirement and as a worm package for use in scope planning and scheduling. This is possible due to the incremental nature of agile methods. Work is decomposed into work packaged along user goal and contain all or at least most of the steps in the software development lifecycle. This in contrast with sequential methods where the work is decomposed by type instead.
User stories with the addition of conditions for satisfaction (high-level acceptance test cases) is the most important artefact in the communication between the customer team and development team. This interface is probably the hardest to get right in IT and being to able to write good user stories would be a great boon.
The book is from 2004 and is beginning to show its age. I think Cohn might have changed his mind on some things since then, for instance on the use of ideal days as the measure of a story point. Scrum no longer insists on 30-day sprints. The Wideband Delphi technique for estimating user stories described by Cohn is now usually referred to as planning poker.
The age becomes apparent in another way as well. For some reason Cohn writes a lot about subjects only tangentially related user stories. There are even introductions to both Scrum and eXtreme Programming in there. That might have made sense in a time where these were not as well known as they are today.
Despite this, the book is a decent introduction to user stories, what they are, how to write them and how to use them, complete with a case study. It is pretty short, not a bad thing per se, but it also tries to cover a great range of topics. This means there is not much space left to go into detail on the user stories themselves. I would have liked more both on developing roles and personas and on the "trawling" for user stories. As it is, anyone already familiar with agile methods will find them selves skipping big parts of the book.
As always with Cohn, the book is well written and easy to follow.