2 agile books and one IOException

I just finished 2 books about agile development: User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn and Scrum and XP from the trenches by Henrik Kniberg.

Mike Cohn covers all about user stories. As we're just beginning Scrum with a new project, we will be doing a story writing workshop with some business people. So, User Stories Applied is probably the right book for that.

After not much blabla and good tips, page 49 describes what to do in such a workshop. He suggests to find the top epic stories and break each down. Page 182pp shows the place of a workshop within the path to begin programming:

1) Perform user role modeling

2) Trawl for high-level user stories <-- Start workshop

3) Prioritize stories

4) Refine high- and medium-priority stories

5) Organize stories into groups

6) Create a paper prototype <-- great if we'll reach that in the workshop

7) Refine the prototype

8) Start programming

I think the hardest thing is to gather the top 25 epics. This will be difficult with people discussing each and every detail don't focusing at the higher level. But as this will be the first workshop, we can still learn if things go astray :)

Here's a passage I liked (about 'why user stories'):

"Humans used to have such a marvelous oral tradition; myths and history were passed orally from one generation to the next. Until an Athenian ruler started writing down Homer's The Iliad so that it would not be forgotten, stories like Homer's were told, not read. Our memories must have been a lot better back then and must have started to fade sometime in the 1970s because by then we could no longer remember even short statements like "The system shall prompt the user for a login name and password." So, we started writing them down." (cf. IEEE 830)

So, good book, nice to read and great for looking up user-story-things.

The second book I finished is Scrum and XP from the trenches which is a war story on doing scrum. Lots of hands-ons and lessons-learned stuff. Some parts are interesting like how to handle multiple scrum teams but the most part I heard or read already. If you're new to scrum and agile methods, this is amusing to read (like how to negotiate with the PO). If not, you can scroll over it (as I read it as a free eBook).

And now for the IOException. I made some debug-sessions lately and now and then I came across an IOException just reading "the file exists" when calling GetTempFileName. I loaded old, already released code and even with this *cough* high-quality-code the exception will be thrown. Luckily I found this blog-post dealing with the same problem. Just delete some temp-files (approx. 100,000) and everything works fine now :)