Paul Grenyer

This was this first Software East presentation I have attended. It was hosted at the Redgate offices just off the A14. They were very nice, if not as technologically advanced as Morgan Stanley. It just so happened that Allen Kelly, the speaker, was arriving as I phoned him from the car park, so we wondered in together to find no receptionist and a sign directing us to the Seagull Suite on the first floor. From the first floor there was no indication of where the Seagull Suite was, so Allan gave Mark Dalgarno, the event organiser a call and he showed us to the suite via the “SQL Servery”, Red Gate's appropriately named cafeteria. The presentation was scheduled to take place between 6.30pm and 8.30pm. Two hours is a long time for these events, even though I can imagine Allan speaking for two hours without a problem. I found out that the first half hour is for networking and buffet eating, so I tucked in and chatted to Allan and Pete Goodliffe. Allan spoke about setting up your own ...

by Mike Cohn ISBN: 978-0321205681 After reading Agile Estimating and Planning , also by Mike Cohn, I was rather disappointed with User Stories Applied. Then I saw that Agile Estimating and Planning was published in November 2005 and User Stories Applied was published twenty months earlier in march 2004. A lot of the material in User Stories Applied forms the basis for and is expanded in Agile Estimating and Planning. Therefore I have come to the conclusion that Mike Cohn spent the twenty months between the two books improving as a writer! However, I think there is great scope for merging the two books and coming up with a better title. There is not enough user story based material here for a single book. Only about half the book is actually about writing user stories. The other sections cover things like planning and testing. There is also some discussion about identifying roles within a system which, on the first read, felt a bit thin. Then when the case study came at the end and I h...