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Summary: A must-have for those new to XP!
Review: I was once part of a new XP project where the users were very confused as to how to write a user story, having written nothing but detailed requirements their entire lives. The developers, also new to XP, didn't completely comprehend that they were to actually work with and talk to the users to elicit further details. Oh, if only I had had this book then! I would have purchased a copy for every user and every developer! There is a huge mental shift that has to take place when embracing agile methodologies, and Mike Cohn's book is an excellent catalyst for that change, making it a less painful transformation for those players involved. Cohn even spells out each group's responsibilities at the end of every chapter -- there's no ambiguity around who's supposed to do what. There are lots of examples that are easily understood, and the layout provides you with the information you and your team need in a logical sequence. Chapter 4 has a fabulous section called "Story Writing Workshop" that again provides that step-by-step hand-holding that first-timers need. I highly recommend this book. It's an excellent primer on the process of defining requirements in an agile environment.
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Summary: Great Intro for Product Managers
Review: I've been a product manager for longer than I care to mention. Although I've always had good relationships with engineering, I have always looked for ways to have better, ongoing dialogue with the team. I am very much looking forward to applying the ideas from Mike Cohn's book. I think it will provide faster, cleaner, and less bureaucratic requirements -- but most importantly, better communication between the product management and engineering organizations and better products.
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Summary: Highly Recommended
Review: Many books have been written about requirements gathering as a discipline, and many more about techniques for doing it. To my knowledge, this is the first book dedicated to "user stories", the form of software requirements capture used in Extreme Programming (XP). At first blush, you might think that there isn't enough to the topic to warrant a book, because the beauty of user stories is their simplicity. But Mike Cohn shows that there is indeed plenty of potential material -- and useful material at that. My only complaint about this book is that the proofreading could have been more careful; there are too many "stray words" left over from editing.
In "User Stories Applied", Cohn explains what stories are, what makes a good story, and how stories are written. He uses copious examples throughout, and I enjoyed the self-test questions at the end of each chapter. My favorite part of the book comes near the end, when he works through how the initial set of stories would be developed using a nontrivial example (an eCommerce web site.)
Although user stories are traditionally associated with XP, they can be used without it, and Cohn shows how stories fit in with other agile methodologies (Scrum in particular.) If you need to capture requirements for agile projects, or if you're sick of writing ISO standard requirements documents and think there must be a better way, then this book is for you.
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Summary: Excellent Guides on Writing Good User Stories
Review: The author gave an overview of user stories in the Agile process. Cover the why, what, how, generation, splitting, etc of writing good user stories. It relates the users stories to the Agile processes. The explanations are very clear. I particularly like the chapter-end summaries, and especially the Developers and Customers responsibilies. Your non-technical customers could read it themselves and learn to write good user stories. It has a quick overview of XP, Scrum and comparison with use-cases. This is an excellent introductory how-to-do user-stories book for Agile Methodology.
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Summary: Finally! Practical advice on writing user stories, and more
Review: 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.
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Summary: good "how-to" book
Review: This is a very good book. It describes how to write requirements as xp stories, what makes a good story, how to gather requirements, and a little bits about acceptance testing, estimating, and planning. Also nice to see a chapter on using XP-style stories with Scrum. If you are playing the role of a product designer -- even if you're not using Extreme Programming -- you should buy this book, and also buy Gerald M. Weinberg's book on requirements "Exploring Requirements: Quality Before Design" (with Donald C. Gause.) him
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Summary: An Excellent Book!!!
Review: This is an excellent book on user stories. Each chapter is very well written with very good examples. Any team, either using user stories or planning to use it in their project, can learn a lot from this book.
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Summary: A Practical Manual for Writing User Stories
Review: This is an excellent guide to writing User Stories. In addition to explaining what user stories are and how to write them, the book shows you how user stories fit into the development process and answers many of the common questions that arise when one starts writing stories. If you want to start using stories as part of your development process, buy this book; you'll want to read it and have it around for reference later.
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Summary: User requirements that actually focus on the user!
Review: This is the first book I've worked with that seems to finally put the emphasis on requirements gathering where it should be--on the end user. So many books on requirements focus on organization and structure and they tend to ignore the realities of how to actually interact with users and express requirements in their terms. The book also examines approaches to gathering these stories in situations where you may not have direct access to the end user. The overall approach and examples provided throughout the book equip the reader with a clear roadmap for leveraging and applying user stories in their organization. The book also includes insight into how user stories should be integrated into the overall development lifecycle.
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Summary: User Stories Demystified
Review: User Stories Demystified - As you leaf through Mike Cohn's new book "User Stories Applied", the first thing you will experience is a dramatic sense of relief. A certain calm will come over you because at last you have in your hands a very clear, succinct, step-by-step view into the what, when, where, how, and why of user stories. Mike's delivery of this material is richly simple in that he manages to sift through the many worries and controversies that surround the role of user stories in an agile project environment and takes us to the nuggets. At the same time, he sparks the fundamentals with a variety of suggestions for implementation based on his extensive experience. In various XP teams in which I have worked, an early challenge of the team had always been around the ability of the team to shift from requirements and design documents and detailed test plans to user stories. Writing them was tortuous; later interpretation of them felt fuzzy. With Mike's guidance, we would have known not only how to write, estimate, prioritize, and test our stories, we would have also had ample guidance on who should be paying attention to what in each step of the stories' lifecycle. If you are beginning a new project, release, sprint, or iteration, don't move another step without distributing Mike's book across the team as pre-requisite reading. They'll all thank you for it.
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