User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck))

This excellent book is a must-have for anyone on an agile team - developers, testers, business experts, analysts - and for anyone who struggles with requirements, planning, or estimating on any software project. User Stories Applied is easy to read and digest. As the title suggests, its techniques are easy to apply and deliver huge value. Each chapter summarizes developer and customer responsibilities, and has questions whose answers are provided in an appendix. The book is full of real-life, concrete examples, allowing you to learn from the successes and failures of others. This book will give you many tools to help your projects succeed. Just a few of the most valuable topics: When are user stories too big, too small, too detailed, too general, too open ended, when are they not user stories, and how to correct all these. Why use user stories. How to handle requirements for infrastructure, performance, qualitative aspects, UI. How to ask questions to elicit requirements. How to cope when you don't have `on-site customers'. Practical ways to estimate stories. Monitoring velocity and progress. When to keep and when to discard artifacts. Mike explores the differences between stories and other techniques for delivering requirements: IEEE 380, use cases, scenarios. He points out many positive side effects of user stories, such as encouraging participatory design and tacit knowledge accumulation. I particularly like that the book emphasizes the team's responsibility to successfully complete each iteration. I enjoy Mike's illuminating bits of wisdom, such as the "everything takes 4 hours" example. I love the comprehensive example in Part IV. No matter what your level of experience, you'll put the ideas in this book to immediate and productive use.

The book gives an excellent presentation of Agile Software Development from a perspective of one of the key components, that of the "User Story". The User Story is the structural element of Agile in Terms of Requirements Management and emanated as concept out of Extreme Programming. The book introduces nicely and smoothly what are the "User Stories", the qualities of good "User Stories", the Roles and "Personas" owning the "User Stories", the process to Generate, Estimate, Plan and Test the User Stories. At the end of each chapter there is a summary of the main ideas but also a series of questions to test understanding (with their answers provided at the end of the book). The language is smooth and the read is very understandable even for the newcomers in the Agile World. The book offers also a valuable "hands on" feeling of the mechanisms built around user stories through a detailed description of the dialogues that would evolve among team members in a real life example (Part IV). As a "Bonus", the book offers a short introduction to the Scrum Process (which a widely used process and is a kind of orchestration part for Agile) and to Extreme Programming. The book can serve both as a textbook for teaching "User Stories" or as a book to comprehend a little deeper the requirements management processes of Agile once the process has been understood ("Essential Scrum" from the same author could be the one).

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. There's a lot of good sense advice in this book, which might induce someone to think that user stories and all other XP practices are just a bunch of generic suggestions that you might apply or not, as you wish. That's certainly not true, as XP is a methodology whose effectiveness lies in the combined action of all the practices when they are taken to the limit. This takes determination and discipline and, in my experience, it's just too easy to fall into the habit of following only some of them, say when you're not under deadline pressure, and still pretend that you're an XP shop. I would have liked more real-life stories in this book, in order to spice it up a little. As it is, everything that is there sounds highly reasonable (at least to me) but it wouldn't convince anyone who is skeptic of XP's supposed benefits. The example at the end of the book sounds contrived and hollow. On the other hand, if you have been already convinced by Kent Beck's white book and want to start adopting XP, I can heartily recommend Mike Cohn's book.

Mike Cohn's clear and digestible writing style makes him my favorite Agile author. This book continues that tradition. Of all the risks in any software development project, the most dangerous (possibly fatal) risk is not bad code or incomplete tests - it is getting the requirements wrong. The impact can be anywhere from highly dissatisfied clients to unemployed development teams. One of biggest advantages of Agile development is that it directly addresses the reality of changing system requirements and how to keep a project aimed directly for the key business goal even in such a fluid environment. User Stories, and how they are used in an Agile Project Management context, are a key tool in ensuring project success (AKA client satisfaction). Project Managers, Scrum Masters, Lead Developers, QA and Test Leads, Product Owners as well as Business Analysts should read this text. So much of software development process thinking has to do with "doing the thing, in right manner" (AKA good system-building technique). This book covers "doing the right thing" (AKA building the right product).

To quote from the book ".... stories are promises to converse rather than detailed specifications". I find this type of thinking to be a clear realization of the Agile manifesto ([...]/). Unfortunately for me I'm in a highly regulated, detailed specification domain (aerospace), but I hope that gradually I can make the case that a detailed specification does not necessarily mean better software. I think you can achieve a better results by tilting the balance more toward productive conversations than contract negotiations. I really like the concept of keeping requirements simple and putting details in the test case descriptions. I've created a custom field in my project tracking tool do just this. It's a great help to have a definition of all the test cases with pass/fail criteria right there with the statement of what the customer wants. It makes it so easy to know when your done, or as a project lead, to check if a task is really complete (Are the test cases identified with the task written in our automated test suite and passing? If not, you're not done!) If you can't tell yet, I love this book. I expect to reference it regularly. If you're not satisfied with the way your organization does requirements (and I've yet to meet anyone who does!), READ THIS BOOK. Even if you don't buy in completely to every suggestion, I am certain you will find ideas that you will embrace!

As someone new to Agile I found this book focusing on applying stories on a project immensely helpful. There was enough detail of the application of user stories that I felt confident after reading the book that I could participate in a story making session and provide value. I appreciated the succinct overviews on Scrum and Agile throughout, again as someone new. Applying all the concepts of the book in the final chapter describing a real project cemented for me all of the concepts discussed in previous chapters. The book is written in clear language, highly readable, and straightforward. I'll definitely return to this book for reminders and references as I continue my Agile journey.

This book is pretty good overall, but has some very frustrating habits. One habit is of the author not defining new terms he uses. Take testing stories for example. The section starts off ok, because he mentions that some stories aren't testable and gives examples. Fabulous. However, the very next sentence says that tests should be automated, with no explanation as to what that means. Automated how? Automation implies that a person won't do it him/herself. How is that possible when testing stories of software? A person is always involved. His only explanation implies that a test isn't automated because it would require the observation of a user. He never says with certainty though, so that's my attempt to interpret. As a UX designer, it sounds weird that a test would take place without a real user, and that you should test things in some other way that equates with "automation." Maybe I don't get it because I'm not a developer, but I think a new term like that should be explicitly defined. I have had several instances similar to this one, where a term is thrown into the mix and never fully explained. Otherwise the book is very informative. **Update I'm continuing with the book and have just now found the answer to what an automated test is in Chapter 6, and automated testing was first mentioned in Chapter 2. I can't speak for all readers obviously, but I find myself doing Google searches to fill in the blanks this book leaves. Unfortunately there aren't a lot of books written on this subject (on Amazon anyways), so it can be difficult to supplement.

I have been spending the last few months immersing myself in Agile and trying to learn as much as I can. I have so far read five different books on the subject including this one and I have one left. This is by far the most lucid, well-written, practical book on the subject. Agile books tend to sometimes get too anecdotal and speak in metaphors before they give you some useful practical steps. Not this one. Mr. Cohn starts being useful right away and gives practical and useful advice. This book was worth every penny. In fact it made the other books I read clearer. If you want a simple effective explanation of how to write user stories, look no further.

Coté contenu du livre : Le livre est extra. Il m'apporte pas d'éclaircissements sur les users stories et me permet de gagner en efficacité sur ce domaine. Coté état su livre : Une trace de cutter de 5 cm sur le livre. heureusement que le coup de cutter n'a pas été trop loin. Dommage. je fais donc attention pour ne pas provoquer la déchirure mais je garde le livre. J'ai mis un bout de scotch qui fait l'affaire.

I read it multiple times over the past ten years as this book has standardised most of the Agile ways of working. The book is relevant to all Agile practitioners irrespective of the framework they use even after 16 years of its publication!!! You will learn all about user stories, how to split them, guidelines and bad smells of user stories. You will understand user roles vs personas and so on. The author also talked about Agile estimating and planning. However, I would strongly recommend that you read the other book on Agile estimating and planning by the same author. The author walks us through a hypothetical website creation for us to better understand. All the chapters are like "short" night time stories. And the examples stick to your mind.

Pure Gold! The first chapter will convince you why User stories are orders of magnitude better than the use cases you know and love. Each of the subsequent short chapters is tightly focused and covers a key aspect of user stories (e.g. writing good stories, user profile mapping. using stories in planning and estimating etc.). As you go through the book, you can see how the different pieces of user stories fit together and how user stories themselves fit into a software development process. (The book itself leans heavily towards an agile process such as Scrum or XP although the exact process does not really matter) Despite its directness and succinctness, it is a very engaging and thought-provoking book. If you want to understand behaviour-driven development, specification-by-example or user story mapping (each of which is adequately in a book by a key populariser/practitioner of the respective technique) you should really read this book first. And even if you never practice any of those techniques, you should still read this book if you want to learn how to capture software requirements effectively in the modern, agile, test-driven world. It is one of that crop of brilliantly written, painstakingly edited software engineering books written by luminaries in their fields, that were published by Addison-Wesley in the 2000s: Refactoring by Fowler, Test-Driven Deveopment by Beck, this book, Pattern-oriented software architecture I and II, Patterns of Enterprise Software Integration (Fowler et. al.) and many others. They remain as relevant and thought-provoking today as when they were first written.

Altro autore di riferimento per l'agile. Da leggere se interessa la metodologia. Linea guida semplice e di buon senso. Da studiare

Very well written book. It explains everything you need to understand Agile (a collaborative process involving customer and developers) and use it to deliver software that meets user expectations in an incremental way that allows for changes along the way, and achieve greater customer satisfaction, based on a more realistic approach for planning and estimating. The book is filled with clear examples. Most chapters end with a summary, questions (answered in an Appendix), customer and developer responsibilities. There is a whole process case study in an Appendix.