Nocturn vision

I just finished reading Mike Cohn’s book, User stories applied: for agile development. A book that teaches you what user stories are, what their benefits are, how you write them, and how you use them within agile processes such as Scrum and eXtreme programming. It also describes what differences stories from use cases, and why working with user stories can help to successfully manage requirements for an application. User stories applied is very easy to read, and in around 200 pages Cohn covers everything you need to know about them.

If you’re involved in agile processes such as Scrum or XP, this is a very interesting read. It will give you a greater understanding of how to fully take advantage of the flexibility they provide. You’ll learn how to write them, how to estimate them (from epics to stories), and eventually even to plan releases based on them.

Even if you’re not doing Scrum or XP, but you are dealing with users directly to identifiy requirements, this is an interesting read. It gives you a greater understanding of how to identify requirements and how to handle new requirements during the development process.

The book is divided in 4 parts. The first one covers the “what” and the “how” of user stories, and once you’ve read this part, you’ll be ready to begin writing your stories. The second part of the book guides you through the estimation and planning of releases. The third part explains what you gain by using a story-approach, how to apply user stories using Scrum, and a collection of story smells. Part 4 provides you with a real world example, from defining roles, writing stories, estimating them and planning releases.

How this book has helped me

As I had already said before, it’s not been long since I started out with Scrum, and this book’s first part, helped me out to fully understand how to identify requirements and write user stories, how to estimate them, and how to plan releases. Just today we finished another iteration, and everything is going by schedule.

When I compare this way of working, with how we dealt with requirements before, I think it’s a very big step forward. I’ve never believed in upfront analysis without misunderstood requirements, and even missed requirements, so it brings me great satisfaction to work with stories.

It was a good read! Try it out!