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User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development 1st Edition

by Mike Cohn (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 571 ratings
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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.

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  1. ISBN-10
    0321205685
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0321205681
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publisher
    Addison-Wesley Professional
  5. Publication date
    March 1, 2004
  6. Part of series
    Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)
  7. Language
    English
  8. Dimensions
    6.9 x 0.8 x 9.2 inches
  9. Print length
    304 pages
  10. See all details
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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:

Pencil

Conversation

Testing

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 ‏ : ‎ 6.9 x 0.8 x 9.2 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 571 ratings

About the author

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Mike Cohn

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 stars
571 global ratings

Customers say

Customers find the book excellent, with good examples and reference materials. They say it's an essential lecture book for all professionals that wants to get a better understanding of story points. Readers also describe the book as very readable, enjoyable, and concise. They appreciate the smooth language and well-laid-out chapters.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

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Information qualityReadability
43 customers mention "Information quality"40 positive3 negative

Customers find the book excellent and useful for understanding how to use story points. They say it provides practical and useful advice and is an essential lecture book for all professionals that wants to get a better understanding of the method. Readers also appreciate the succinct analysis of the differences between the user stories methodology and Agile. Overall, they say the book offers a good amount of information on writing user stories and is accessible.

"...out many positive side effects of user stories, such as encouraging participatory design and tacit knowledge accumulation...." Read more

"...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..." Read more

"...The book introduces nicely and smoothly what are the "User Stories", the qualities of good "User Stories", the Roles and "Personas" owning the "User..." Read more

"...Otherwise the book is very informative.**Update..." Read more

26 customers mention "Readability"22 positive4 negative

Customers find the book very readable, enjoyable, and concise. They appreciate the smooth language, well-organized chapters, and crystal-clear presentation of material. Readers also like the chapter-end summaries that structure ideas.

"...User Stories Applied is easy to read and digest. As the title suggests, its techniques are easy to apply and deliver huge value...." Read more

"...The language is smooth and the read is very understandable even for the newcomers in the Agile World...." Read more

"...It is very well laid out, the chapters are the right length, it has excellent recommendations and it is simply well written...." Read more

"...This is by far the most lucid, well-written, practical book on the subject...." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

Lisa Crispin
5.0 out of 5 stars 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
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M. Myers
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent condition
Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2024
Verified Purchase
Just started the book but very easy to digest. So glad I bought a used copy because it appears to be in perfect condition!
One person found this helpful
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Ugo Cei
4.0 out of 5 stars 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
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Dimitris Tranoudis
5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent and complete book on Agile Requirements Management centered on the "User Stories" concept.
Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2015
Verified Purchase
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).
One person found this helpful
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Cliente de Kindle
5.0 out of 5 stars Recomendado para entender qué es y qué no es una historia de usuario
Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2023
Verified Purchase
La historia de usuario es un término que se usa muy a la ligera en el mundo de la programación. Este libro destruye los mitos y enfatiza el objetivo real: describir de manera simple lo que el usuario quiere en el sistema. Además, ofrece pautas sobre el Proceso de desarrollo de software utilizando historias de usuario y una breve y útil reseña de XP.
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Top reviews from other countries

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N. Murali Mohan
5.0 out of 5 stars Agile ways of working are standardised
Reviewed in India on September 17, 2020
Verified Purchase
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.
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Client d'Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars Super livre, mais .......
Reviewed in France on September 11, 2018
Verified Purchase
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.
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PL Blanco
5.0 out of 5 stars Imprescindible
Reviewed in Spain on September 28, 2017
Verified Purchase
Magnifico libro, con ejemplos de como se debe realizar una buena historia de usuario, lectura muy recomendable para todo interesado en Agilidad.
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Cliente Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars Da studiare
Reviewed in Italy on August 28, 2016
Verified Purchase
Altro autore di riferimento per l'agile. Da leggere se interessa la metodologia. Linea guida semplice e di buon senso. Da studiare
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SYED N AUSAF
5.0 out of 5 stars 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.
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