InfoQ Homepage User Stories Content on InfoQ
-
Burn Stories Not Tasks
Developers commonly break user stories into tasks to facilitate distributing the implementation work across the team, and allow tracking of progress at a finer level of granularity. Unfortunately, a story can explode into a list of non-trivial tasks so large that the story is not deliverable by the end of the iteration. Ron Jeffries suggests: "Do stories as a unit, not broken into tasks."
-
Story-Focused Standups
A widely accepted agile practice is the daily standup meeting, in which each team member shares: what they have done since the previous standup, what they expect to achieve by the next, and anything that is getting in their way. Mike Cohn recently examined variations that shed additional light on the progress being made toward completing each user story.
-
Use Cases or User Stories?
User stories are better than use cases - right? Not necessarily. It depends on whom you ask. There are definite benefits to user stories as they encourage conversation and discourage the "throw over the wall" mentality of more heavy-weight requirements documents. But do they have drawbacks?
-
Article: User Story Estimation Techniques
One of the great things about working as a consultant is the ability to try out many different ideas and adapting your personal favorite process to include things that work. This article gives the details about user story estimation techniques that Jay Fields has found effective.
-
New User Story Format Emphasizes Business Value
User stories, a common format for capturing agile requirements, could be more focused on business value. A traditional format for stating a user story is: "As a <type of user> I want <some functionality> so that <some benefit>." A value-centric replacement would be: "In order to <achieve some value>, as a <type of user>, I want <some functionality>."
-
Presentation: Agile Project Lifecycle in User Stories and Release Planning
In this presentation recorded during QCon London 2007, Rachel Davies, director of Agile Alliance, talks about the Agile development cycle starting with user stories and planning the releases.
-
Right-Size Your User Stories
For those using User Stories, getting them right is one of the difficult aspects of an Agile process - they can drive or bog down your work. Pat Kua recently addressed a key question: How much detail should you put in your story? The answer, of course, is "it depends" on where you are in the process.
-
Are Product Backlogs Wasteful?
Planning the features to be developed is an important part of software development. In Scrum, the list of features desired but not yet implemented is typically called the backlog (or product backlog). This is meant to be lightweight, but can it still be wasteful?
-
InfoQ Interview: Alistair Cockburn
At Agile2006 InfoQ interviewed Alistair Cockburn, methodology creator, author and long-time leader in the Agile community. Topics discussed ranged from the history of the Agile movement to the future of methodologies, with a look at User Stories and Use Cases along the way. This interview uncovers how his research for IBM may have sparked the creation of the Agile Manifesto.