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).

User stories are a method of capturing requirements which was originally introduced in the extreme programming method. User stories are commonly described as "a promiss for a conversation" and are often recorded on index cards (at least, originally). Mike Cohn's book takes the user story practice out of Extreme Programming and shows how it can be used in general in different methods. The key-idea of user stories is that conversations and understanding via documentation is often wasteful and inefficient. User Stories describes a requirement in such a way that we can remember it in the future. At the time the requirement is ready to be implemented, we'll discuss the requirement in more detail. That way we can delay some of the requirement analysis and move it closer to when we implement it. This reduces "requirement inventory" and can lead to less waste in the development process. Whether and how to use user stories in your project depends on many different variables and user stories explained will explain the details of user stories, the different types of user stories and give plenty of examples. All this is needed for a better understanding and for deciding how user stories can help you on your project. The book is well written, though personally I found that it contained too much text. There was quite much repetition and that made the book slightly boring after a 100 pages. It could have been written with less text, in my opinion. Another drawback of the book was that the examples given didn't feel real enough. It would have been nice to cover some larger projects and also discuss how user stories would work on these. In conclusion, User Stories Applied is the definitive and only reference on user stories and when interested in user stories or when working with user stories, this is an absolute must!

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!

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.

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.

Highly recommend for anyone wanting to understand Agile / Scrum or to brush up on it. I'm in my fourth reading of the book now. It was the mother's milk I needed in 2007 when I got started with Agile, and today after years of experience, I still find myself going back to it. Mike is a feet on the ground, 'this is how we've applied it and seen it work' as opposed to a head in the clouds, 'this is how it should work in theory' kind of teacher. The difference in those two approaches brings us a very readable, enjoyable book on Agile. Straight forward, easy to read, and re-read.

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.

As a budding Scrum Master or for anyone looking to find out more about the “origins” of user stories and why they are useful this is a must read. Mike Cohn is an absolute don.

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.