Book of the week: User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development

Last week I read 2 books in preparation for the Agile personal project.

User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development

by Mike Cohn
Addison-Wesley Professional © 2004 (304 pages) Citation
ISBN:9780321205681

“The concept of user stories has its roots as one of the main tenets of Extreme Programming. In simple terms, user stories represent an effective means of gathering requirements from the customer (roughly akin to use cases). This book describes user stories and demonstrates how they can be used to properly plan, manage, and test software development projects. The book highlights both successful and unsuccessful implementations of the concept, and provides sets of questions and exercises that drive home its main points. After absorbing the lessons in this book, readers will be able to introduce user stories in their organizations as an effective means of determining precisely what is required of a software application.”

This book was my homework for last week, Rafael recommended this one as a classic. I got the Kindle version so it’s not the 2004 but a 13th reprint from 2009.

First part I really liked the way author explains how to write user stories being very clear what is not a user story.

Second part can be used by a project manager/scrum master for estimations and planning, while reading this section I was taking a look to the agile project management site Acunote and everything started to make more sense, the story points, priorities, velocity, etc.

Last part is full of tips, I tried to follow the example overlapping it with a project where I’m just an observer, and I think I found more than one case where I noticed we are doing something wrong.

Definitely a 5 stars book, easy to read and good use of samples.

Agile: Personal project – install XCode 4.0

In preparation to start the project I commented in previous post (or my own “Sprint Zero”), I bought and installed the latest version of Apple XCode 4.0

I had version 3.2 installed before and was free when you setup a developer account in Apple. But this version 4.0 that just came out March 8th is free if you have paid the annual $99 fee (I have not) or you can buy it for 4.99 in the App store in your Mac, which I did.

Installation is about 6GB, it can keep previous version by moving to /Developers_Old folder, I had not much space in my MacBook Air so I uninstalled Xcode completely and then proceeded to install 4.0.

To uninstall developer tools/Xcode type in the following command in the terminal:

sudo /Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools –mode=all

Why did I buy the new version? Well, I did some “hello world” applications last year with the XCode 3 and it was a bit uncomfortable navigating between different tools to get the work done, before you had:

– XCode: code editor, a graphical debugger, and integrated Objective-C, C, and C++ compilers

– Interface Builder: To create your user interface

– Instruments: To view the performance of your application

 

I’m a .NET developer and I like to have all tools integrated in one environment, so when I read the details of XCode 4.0 I really like it:

– Single window (no more jumping around)

– Interface Builder is built-in

– Assistant (anticipate files to open based on what you are working on)

– Fix-it and Live Issues (like Re-sharper)

– Version Editor included (no more messy installations of subversion 🙂

 

I just started to play with XCode 4, I will add more reviews in future posts, but I’m sure my 4.99 were well spent.

Agile: Let’s start a personal project

Yesterday I finally made my friend Rafa Muñoz “El Maru” to help build a project in our free time, to post ideas on his newly acquired title as Scrum master and as way to make us find some time to give back to the community.

The idea is to build a project with 2 resources, just 2 he and me. Rafa will document the project, process and build the framework around the Agile / Scrum methodology while I will be just the “agile” developer .

In his terms for “sprint 0” I will read a classic book from 2004 “User stories applied for agile software development” so I can write the first stories while he set up the site where the project management will be held.

Project will be an iPhone application for a school, to have news, calendar of events and send notifications.

More details soon.