Table of Contents

Foreword.


Acknowledgments.


Introduction.

I: GETTING STARTED.

1: An Overview.
What Is a User Story? Where Are the Details? “How Long Does It Have to Be?” The Customer Team. What Will the Process Be Like? Planning Releases and Iterations. What Are Acceptance Tests? Why Change? Summary. Questions. 2: Writing Stories.
Independent. Negotiable. Valuable to Purchasers or Users. Estimatable. Small. Testable. Summary. Developer Responsibilities. Customer Responsibilities. Questions. 3: User Role Modeling.
User Roles. Role Modeling Steps. Two Additional Techniques. What If I Have On-Site Users? Summary. Developer Responsibilities. Customer Responsibilities. Questions. 4: Gathering Stories.
Elicitation and Capture Should Be Illicit. A Little Is Enough, or Is It? Techniques. User Interviews. Questionnaires. Observation. Story-Writing Workshops. Summary. Developer Responsibilities. Customer Responsibilities. Questions. 5: Working with User Proxies.
The Users' Manager. A Development Manager. Salespersons. Domain Experts. The Marketing Group. Former Users. Customers. Trainers and Technical Support. Business or Systems Analysts. What

Promotional Information

The concept of user stories has its roots as one of the main tenets of Extreme Programming. In simple terms, user stories represent an effective means of gathering requirements from the customer (roughly akin to use cases). This book describes user stories and demonstrates how they can be used to properly plan, manage, and test software development projects. The book highlights both successful and unsuccessful implementations of the concept, and provides sets of questions and exercises that drive home its main points. After absorbing the lessons in this book, readers will be able to introduce user stories in their organizations as an effective means of determining precisely what is required of a software application.

About the Author

Mike Cohn is the founder of Mountain Goat Software, a process and project management consultancy and training firm. With more than twenty years of experience, Mike has been a technology executive in companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 40s, and is a founding member of the Agile Alliance. He frequently contributes to industry-related magazines and presents regularly at conferences. He is the author of User Stories Applied (Addison-Wesley, 2004).