I have often experienced that the discussion “should we write user stories or use cases?” arises when a new project are about to start. I have also asked the question myself quite a few times. There is no right or wrong answer to this question, it all depends on the nature of the project and organisation. Personally I like to write both user stories and use cases for the projects that I am involved in.
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.
I have earlier written a post about writing user stories for agile (Scrum) projects. During several projects I have now refined the way I do this and in this post I will explain my preferred way to write user stories.
I have changed my mindset when writing user stories by using the INVEST acronym. The INVEST acronym is 6 rules of thumb that you use when writing/defining the user stories.
I will kick off the Run Smart With Me (RSWM) project by writing user stories. By doing so I will have a good idea on what functionality I need to implement in this Windows Mobile application. When writing these user stories I will use the template from my earlier post: Writing user stories for agile (Scrum) projects.
This post will show all user stories I have written for the RSWM application.
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).
