In the Pig and Chicken analogy for Scrum participants (Jeff Sutherland explains Pigs & Chickens), the Pig is the one who is required to make the biggest commitment and put his proverbial skin in the game. For the Pig, it is an all or nothing proposition. They either meet their commitment or they do not, there is no gray area. However, many teams fail to get this level of commitment from their Pigs, or don’t even ask for it in the first place. This is the genesis of the Outlier Pig.
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The prioritization of Stories is a core practice in the Scrum agile development process. In fact it is probably the single most important responsibility of the Product Owner – making sure the Product Backlog is prioritized properly to maximize business value (a.k.a ROI). However, there is a common anti-pattern that I see regularly in which the Product Owner and the Delivery Team act complicitly to establish a priority order for Stories that are being committed too within a single Sprint. The need to do this comes from a negative place and it has dramatic consequences for the Delivery Team.
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We finished reviewing “User Stories Applied – For Agile Software Development” by Mike Cohn as a group.

This was the second book we have reviewed as a group by Mike Cohn. Previously we also reviewed Agile Estimating and Planning

I can highly recommend this book if you are looking to improve your use of User Stories and you need a gentle introduction to some other Agile topics. The book specifically ties the use of User Stories to both Scrum and XP and shows the benefits of using User Stories over other requirements gathering techniques. In addition it provides guidance on how to generate User Stories and also how to ensure the stories are of the correct level of precision.

We will definitely be adopting many of the processes in the book, particularly those related to generating the stories up front and identifying user types and creating personas to represent important user groups.

The link below will take you to Amazon.com to purchase the book if you are interested.