I’ve just been reading Mike Cohn’s ‘User Stories Applied’ for agile software development.  Excellent book – well worth a read and it’s helped me clarify my understanding of what user stories are, how to use them and how they relate to use cases.

I’ve pulled out some sound-bites that I liked:

“Story cards are the reminder to talk!”

“Just because users have the problem does not mean they are uniquely qualified to propose its solution”

Also liked his analogy for gathering requirements, where he suggests its like fishing with nets. We start with a net with big holes so we only catch the really big requirements, then over time the holes in the net get smaller. Traditional requirement gathering uses a very fine mesh net that attempts to catch everything first time round. Usually sinking the boat (I made up that bit – hope you don’t mind Mike).

I’d recommend this book to anyone involved in agile projects. There’s some good stuff in there.

Now I know you’re going to say ‘Jon, you haven’t mentioned anything about test in this post!’. Well don’t panic, I’m going to do a seperate post on my thoughts around how it releates to testing, especially system test.