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User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development 1st Edition

by Mike Cohn (Author)

4.5 546 ratings

Part of: Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck) (6 books)

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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.

ISBN-10

0321205685
ISBN-13

978-0321205681
Edition

1st
Publisher

Addison-Wesley Professional
Publication date

March 1, 2004
Part of series

Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)
Language

English
Dimensions

7 x 0.65 x 9.25 inches
Print length

304 pages
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From the Publisher

A user story describes functionality that will be valuable to either a user or purchaser of a system or software. User stories are composed of three aspects:


A written description of the story used for planning and as a reminder	Conversations about the story that serve to flesh out the details of the story	Tests that convey and document details and that can be used to determine when a story is complete

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

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

www.awprofessional.com

ISBN: 0-321-20568-5

About the Author

Mike Cohn is the founder of Mountain Goat Software, a process and project management consultancy and training firm. With more than twenty years of experience, Mike has been a technology executive in companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 40s, and is a founding member of the Agile Alliance. He frequently contributes to industry-related magazines and presents regularly at conferences. He is the author of User Stories Applied (Addison-Wesley, 2004).

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Addison-Wesley Professional; 1st edition (March 1, 2004)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0321205685
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0321205681
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 0.65 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #335,403 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #382 in Microsoft Programming (Books)
- #401 in Software Development (Books)
- #982 in Computer Software (Books)

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4.5 546 ratings

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Mike Cohn

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Mike Cohn is the founder of Mountain Goat Software, a process and project management consultancy and training firm. Mike specializes in helping companies adopt and improve their use of agile processes and techniques in order to build extremely high performance development organizations. He is the author of "Agile Estimating and Planning," "User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development," and "Succeeding with Agile: Software Development using Scrum."

With more than 20 years of experience, Mike has previously been a technology executive in companies of various sizes, from startup to Fortune 40. He has also written articles for Better Software, IEEE Computer, Software Test and Quality Engineering, Agile Times, Cutter IT Journal, and the C++ Users' Journal. Mike is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, is a founding member of the Agile Alliance, and serves on its board of directors. He is a Certified ScrumMaster Trainer and a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM. He can be reached at www.mountaingoatsoftware.com.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5

546 global ratings

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3 star		7%
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Ugo Cei

For XP enthusiasts

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 4, 2005

Verified Purchase

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.

14 people found this helpful

Helpful

The definitive reference on User Stories

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 10, 2006

Verified Purchase

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!

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Lisa Crispin

Finally! Practical advice on writing user stories, and more

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 14, 2004

Verified Purchase

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.

31 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Anastasiya

Out dated

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 18, 2018

Verified Purchase

If you have completed at least 1 modern-world IT project, ideally an implementation project, and you are familiar with the process of writing Functional Requirements, translating to development requirements, then developing requirements etc, this book is utterly useless. It is an out-dated guide of someone who has not been up to date on the advances of technological tools used these days (or has not been close enough assuming everything is still the same as 10 years ago) I would have liked to see information which can be applied from small to multi-stream projects and how stories play a role. At least a requirements workflow from writing high level 'requirements'/placeholders, to writing out scenarios, then technical review, then PO/Business review and into development. There are no example of the modern world in this book of how each of these stages can be approached, documented and any common issues faced. This is the least I would expect from a book that is dedicated to 'user stories APPLIED'

4 people found this helpful

SYED N AUSAF

Pure Gold!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 21, 2016

Verified Purchase

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.

Anonymous

Excellent - Must have for everyone

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 20, 2016

Verified Purchase

Well worth the investment and study this book. One thing I find is that people continuously make the mistake that User stories have to go into so much detail. Ive worked with Devs who refuse to take a story into a sprint because it isn't a black and white description of what the end result should be. There are a lot of top down monitoring managers and PMs who push scrum teams to write all requirements down to this level.

This is a good book for anyone to read who works in scrum or XP. Will help to set expectations of what a User story really is, and what a user story isn't. Uses very good, sound examples.

One person found this helpful

Michael May

Always Worth a Close Look

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 23, 2018

Verified Purchase

Still a go-to for the Agile landscape, this book still covers a lot of useful material and is as relevant today as always in a way that tells you that Agile still has a way to go before we can consider ourselves to be doing it effectively.

KromeInk

Great book for anyone wanting to become an expert.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 30, 2019

Verified Purchase

Excellent book for teaching you how to write user stories and set them out to an advanced level. I only had a basic idea on how to do these before reading this book and can now quite easily operate within an advanced environment.

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A user story describes functionality that will be valuable to either a user or purchaser of a system or software. User stories are composed of three aspects:

A written description of the story used for planning and as a reminder

Conversations about the story that serve to flesh out the details of the story

Tests that convey and document details and that can be used to determine when a story is complete

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