Skip to main content

User Stories Applied – For Agile Software Development

Image
By

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 had had chance to think about user roles in my own context I started see how useful defining them could be.

As you would expect, user stories are talked about in a reasonable amount of depth and most of the advice seems good to me. One of the main points I liked was the clear explanation of how user stories differ from tradition requirements capture and upfront design.

Mike Cohn asks questions at the end of each chapter. At the end of the book there are two appendices. One giving an introduction to XP and the other the answers to the questions.

Overall User Stories Applied is a little bit killer, but mostly filler.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...
22 comments
Read more

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Do software engineering professionals still read? - survey results

By
  In order to gauge the potential audience for my book, So you think you can lead a team? , I conducted a small survey of my colleagues, co-workers and anyone from Linked. I read regularly, for work and pleasure, and assumed everyone else did too but did the responses I received confirm this? I polled 173 people, all within the software engineering field (including Product, etc), with a range of ages and years of experience in their role. What surprised me the most was that the majority of people, young or old, just starting or seasoned, still prefer reading physical books to blogs or e-readers. It also seemed that the older and more experienced were the most keen in learning more, and reading to expand or update their knowledge.  When it comes to reading habits between different roles the survey showed that software engineers and team leads read more regularly for their career than other roles, with 55 years old and over and 16+ years experience being the biggest readers over...
3 comments
Read more