User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development

User Stories Applied is easy to read and digest. As the title suggests, its techniques are easy to apply and deliver huge value. Each chapter summarizes developer and customer responsibilities, and has questions whose answers are provided in an appendix. The book is full of real-life, concrete examples, allowing you to learn from the successes and failures of others.

This book will give you many tools to help your projects succeed. Just a few of the most valuable topics:
When are user stories too big, too small, too detailed, too general, too open ended, when are they not user stories, and how to correct all these.
Why use user stories.
How to handle requirements for infrastructure, performance, qualitative aspects, UI.
How to ask questions to elicit requirements.
How to cope when you don't have `on-site customers'.
Practical ways to estimate stories.
Monitoring velocity and progress.
When to keep and when to discard artifacts.

Mike explores the differences between stories and other techniques for delivering requirements: IEEE 380, use cases, scenarios. He points out many positive side effects of user stories, such as encouraging participatory design and tacit knowledge accumulation.

I particularly like that the book emphasizes the team's responsibility to successfully complete each iteration. I enjoy Mike's illuminating bits of wisdom, such as the "everything takes 4 hours" example. I love the comprehensive example in Part IV. No matter what your level of experience, you'll put the ideas in this book to immediate and productive use.


The only game in town   September 3, 2004
Ernest Friedman-Hill (Gaithersburg, MD United States)
10 out of 11 found this review helpful

Many books have been written about requirements gathering as a discipline, and many more about techniques for doing it. To my knowledge, this is the first book dedicated to "user stories", the form of software requirements capture used in Extreme Programming (XP). At first blush, you might think that there isn't enough to the topic to warrant a book, because the beauty of user stories is their simplicity. But Mike Cohn shows that there is indeed plenty of potential material -- and useful material at that. My only complaint about this book is that the proofreading could have been more careful; there are too many "stray words" left over from editing.

In "User Stories Applied", Cohn explains what stories are, what makes a good story, and how stories are written. He uses copious examples throughout, and I enjoyed the self-test questions at the end of each chapter. My favorite part of the book comes near the end, when he works through how the initial set of stories would be developed using a nontrivial example (an eCommerce web site.)

Although user stories are traditionally associated with XP, they can be used without it, and Cohn shows how stories fit in with other agile methodologies (Scrum in particular.) If you need to capture requirements for agile projects, or if you're sick of writing ISO standard requirements documents and think there must be a better way, then this book is for you.


A valuable book that supports any agile methodology   April 29, 2004
Jim Highsmith (Flagstaff, AZ USA)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful

Every agile methodology advocates iterative, story-driven (although they may call them features or backlog items) development and so one might assume that an entire book on user stories and iterative planning would be redundant-not so. Mike has added both a breadth and depth to the body of information on this subject as his obvious practical experience shines through. Both little tidbits, like constraining estimates to specific pre-defined values, and responses to frequently asked questions (for example the best contrasting of use cases versus stories that I've seen) give Mike's book significant value for anyone practicing agile development of any flavor.


A must-have for those new to XP!   July 16, 2004
Michele Sliger (Denver, CO United States)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful

I was once part of a new XP project where the users were very confused as to how to write a user story, having written nothing but detailed requirements their entire lives. The developers, also new to XP, didn't completely comprehend that they were to actually work with and talk to the users to elicit further details. Oh, if only I had had this book then! I would have purchased a copy for every user and every developer! There is a huge mental shift that has to take place when embracing agile methodologies, and Mike Cohn's book is an excellent catalyst for that change, making it a less painful transformation for those players involved. Cohn even spells out each group's responsibilities at the end of every chapter -- there's no ambiguity around who's supposed to do what. There are lots of examples that are easily understood, and the layout provides you with the information you and your team need in a logical sequence. Chapter 4 has a fabulous section called "Story Writing Workshop" that again provides that step-by-step hand-holding that first-timers need. I highly recommend this book. It's an excellent primer on the process of defining requirements in an agile environment.