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Showing posts from March, 2008

What's in a User Story?

Being Agile: my occasional ramblings on Agile development & Extreme Programming I constantly run into people who claim to be Agile but don't understand XP (extreme programming). And a lot of people fail to grasp the essence of XP because they get stuck on an XP principle that they find threatening - 'pair programming' and 'test driven development' are the usual suspects. I'll focus on Pair Programming and TDD another day. Today I want to discuss the most important and fundamental aspect of XP - User Stories. User Stories are like better, state-of-the-art Use-Cases - simpler and lending themselves to be scheduled individually. Think of a User Story as a fine-grained Use-Case, leading to better estimation of effort, tracking of progress, and higher quality of implementation (fewer bugs due to requirements that are fine-grained, thorough and less ambiguous). A User Story looks just like a bug would in a bug tracking system: a one-line title summarizing the r...