We have entered 2010 and I am now actually enjoying (a lot of people are complaining) the cold and nice winter weather in Oslo (20 degrees Celsius below freezing). I have had a hectic start on this year preparing the start up of a large national project. This is very exciting and I find this a promising start on 2010.

2009 was the year that I started this blog. It has been interesting writing the posts and communicating with my readers. I have also learned a lot in 2009 and I will for sure continue writing posts on topics I find interesting.

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This is a follow up on a post I wrote earlier about how I like to use Scrum and ScrumWorks for my projects. After writing that post I have had some good discussions on how to manage bug fixing in a Scrum sprint. A good friend and former colleague of mine wrote a good post on how they achieve this in mBricks using JIRA and GreenHopper.

The last months I have been handling bug fixes and rapidly incoming change orders in ScrumWorks and this have been (in my opinion) a great success.

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I have earlier written a post about writing use cases for agile (Scrum) projects, this is a follow up about writing user stories. Do you find it strange that I first wrote about use cases and later are writing about user stories? Well… to be honest with you we started with writing use cases and then later found that this was insufficient and we needed to break the use cases down to short user stories (post-it format).

By doing so you are able to focus on exactly what the user need/want without going into details on how this should be done. We came up with the following template for user stories (I’m saying we because I did this together with a colleague of mine. You can read his blog at www.agilemobility.net).

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I have believed in using Scrum as a software development methodology since I first were introduced to Scrum back in 2005/2006. After a while I took the ScrumMaster certification (CSM) and started using Scrum as the preferred development methodology. During this time Scrum was getting very popular i Norway. It had become a buzz word and projects were either using Scrum or talking about using Scrum.

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Today I started writing use cases for a software development project that are using Scrum. I have written plenty use cases for projects earlier so I thought that this would be a nice task to do on a Friday. I grabbed a good cup of coffee, sat down, listened to Me first and the gimme gimmes on my headset and started writing.

Suddenly I started thinking; this can not be in the spirit of agile development. I had started writing very detailed use cases with a lot of text and description. I turned to my colleague sitting beside me, he’s found of agile development and we often discuss the subject, and asked him what he thought about the use case I had started writing. Then the discussion on how to write use cases for agile projects started…

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