A Kent Beck Signature Book

User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development

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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 Stories Applied will be invaluable to every software developer, tester, analyst, and manager working with any agile method: XP, Scrum... or even your own home-grown approach.

304 pages, Paperback

First published March 1,2004

This edition

Format
304 pages, Paperback
Published
March 1, 2004 by Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN
9780321205681
ASIN
0321205685
Language
English

About the author

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Community Reviews

Rating(4 / 5.0, 100 votes)
5 stars
38(38%)
4 stars
24(24%)
3 stars
38(38%)
2 stars
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100 reviews All reviews
April 17,2025
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Torn between a 3 or a 4. This is a good book for the beginner. I feel the book may be a little outdated. I expected a little more in-depth detail from an entire book about user stories.
April 17,2025
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Works well both as an introduction to agile practices with a focus on user stories and I can strongly recommend it if you are new to Agile as a whole.
Works very well also in case you have experience with agile practices, but less theoretical background on why certain practices work the way they do, I also recommend if you have previous experience in Agile, software development or project management.

Very well written and easy to follow.
April 17,2025
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A good book on User Stories but I found it lacking on how to approach and manage non functional aspects of software development....which may be appropriate if stories aren't the best way but more comment would have been useful.
April 17,2025
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Unfortunately the material in the book is showing its age, and is in strong need of a refresh in 2021. The concepts are solid and as a very basic introduction to product owner activities it stands up and is reasonably practical. Where it misses is in covering the actual practice of writing user stories in greater depth with more complex examples such as writing stories in regulated environments, managing technical activities that are too large to be sub tasks and so on.
April 17,2025
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Great read, a complete insight into user stories with questions and an example project !! What else could you ask for ....
April 17,2025
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Easy to read book, but like so many agile books, the concepts that it presents are so relatively straight forward that it starts to feel kind of repetitive as each point is elaborated again and again.
April 17,2025
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I enjoyed this book about user stories. It is a thorough look at why we break down development projects into stories and how they can be used. I particularly appreciated the concept of personas 'as a sales manager I want to track sales in realtime'. Towards the end there is a small introduction on XP as a coding style that I found fun. All in all a good if unremarkable read
April 17,2025
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I recently learned a fundamental dichotomy in expressing oneself: you use either the 'esoteric' or the 'exoteric' mode. (The exoteric writer says exactly what she means, minimises ambiguity and tries to do everything with explicit reasoning, for the largest audience they can, with imagery and irony only as decoration. The esoteric writer – distinct from, but often coextensive with the woo-woo mystical metaphysics fans also called esoteric – does the converse.

Most ancient writers wrote esoterically, which is one reason that undergrads and other fools, like me, think that ancient writers are vague and low on content. Up to now, I have been confusing the rhetorical stance - see Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, Caputo - with the magickal crap. But so much of the Analytic / Continental divide can be explained in this single distinction! [The revival of the distinction is due to that lionized demon Leo Strauss.] Maths is an interesting border case, but its clarity and attempt to destroy ambiguity make it exoteric, I think.)

The exoteric intention strikes me as firstly just good manners and important for intellectual honesty (accountability, critical clarity). But one thing I dislike about studying computer science is that all the materials are utterly exoteric. I crave art and irreverence in formal contexts, and those are always at least somewhat esoteric. The ‘Agile’ software thing strikes me as good, a way of making the hag-ridden and monstrously expensive dev process work. But all the material around Agile, LEAN (and the wider business-marketing-HR-systems theory blah that represents most employed adults’ only engagement with passably academic work) is so exoteric that something in me rebels.
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