Most Popular Site Items

Recent Blog entries

Advantages of the “As a user, I want” user story template
Apr 25, 2008
Priotizing Tasks Within a Sprint
Mar 20, 2008
When Should We Estimate the Product Backlog
Mar 16, 2008
Writing User Stories for Back-end Systems
Feb 24, 2008
The US-Russian War of 1981
Jan 24, 2008

Mike Cohn's blog is located at blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com.

Popular Items

Introducing An Agile Process to an Organization

by Mike Cohn and Doris Ford, June 2003, IEEE Computer

The transition from a plan-driven to an agile process affects not only the development team members, but also other teams, departments, and management. In this article we describe common pitfalls and effective approaches to making this change.

Advantages of User Stories for Requirements

At the surface, user stories appear to have much in common with use cases and traditional requirements statements. However, there are many subtle differences among them and many advantages to user stories, especially for agile development projects.

Toward a Catalog of Scrum Smells

by Mike Cohn, October 2003, Scrum Alliance

This article was written for the Scrum Alliance soapbox. It presents an initial collection of Scrum smells or indicators that things may be amiss on a Scrum project.

An Overview of Scrum

(5.4 MB) January 01, 2002
This is a 90 minute introduction to Scrum that is fully redistributable and reusable. Use it to introduce Scrum to your user group or organization. PowerPoint version ...

Writing Contracts for Agile Development

User stories are a great way to get people talking about requirements. However, there's a reason why we invented the written word: to make sure that nothing we've said is forgotten or misunderstood. This article explains why contracts are a good way to capture not only the user stories themselves but also to spell out what constitutes the successful implementation of each story.

Metrics You Can Bet On

Numbers may not lie, but mesaurements can sure mislead you. This article explores two myths about metrics and management and offers guidelines for devising project metrics that won't leave you broke and busted.

Sample Burndown Tracking Excel Sheet for Scrum/XP

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This is a sample burndown-tracking Excel spreadsheet. We use this for tracking Scrum sprint backlogs and product backlog.
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Effective User Stories for Agile Requirements

(5.2 MB) September 13, 2006 Software Development Best Practices
Projects start with their requirements. How those requirements are documented or expressed has a tremendous influence on the rest of the project. User stories originated in the agile processes but are useful even if y ...

Planning and Tracking on Agile Projects

(2.1 MB) March 20, 2007 bayXP Meeting at Google
“Agile teams don’t plan.” At least that’s what some people say. In this session we’ll blow that myth out of the water by looking at how agile teams do plan. Along the way ...

Effective User Stories for Agile Requirements

(4.3 MB) March 20, 2007 Software Development West
Projects start with their requirements. How those requirements are documented or expressed has a tremendous influence on the rest of the project. The technique of expressing requirements as user stories ...

Planning and Tracking on Agile Projects

(2.6 MB) November 21, 2006 Oslo, Norway
These slides are from a keynote talk given at the 2006 Simula Research Labs annual Estimation Seminar. ...

Theme Valuation Spreadsheet

(<0.1 MB)
A spreadsheet I use for valuing and comparing either themes (sets of user stories/features) or projects so that the team is sure to be working on the highest-valued items. See a related presentation.
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