User Stories Applied | Book Series

Overview:

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

 

Authors:

Mike Cohn

Published In:

1 March 2004

 

Agile: EF | Glossary

Definition:

Agile Evaluation Framework or Agile: EF was introduced by Krebs and Krell in 2008, an approach to assess how well agile teams are doing. Here they advice to keep things simple and is therefor less of an actual framework than a process for assessing teams.

In this approach Krebs and Krell suggest having team members complete a very short questionnaire at the end of every sprint. Each question concerns an agile practice which is answered with a score in range of 1 – 10, where 10 indicates done 100% of the time and 1 indicating never done. The assessment may be reported in a graph where solid bars indicate the team’s result.  The darker, thinner line indicates how widely opinion vary, calculating standard deviation.

Further Reading:
Book: SUCCEEDING WITH AGILE Software Development Using Scrum by Mike Cohn