Time for a little bit of a rant. In a recent post , Jeffery Palermo paraphrases an analogy made by David Platt on a recent episode of the .NET Rocks podcast : In software, we can't expect our clients to know what they need. Much like the depth of a patient may be "I need to get rid of this infection"...

Themes are categories for user stories. You use them to aggregate user stories into cohesive buckets. The following stories, taken from my product backlog at Xclaim (my company), could be said to fall into a "security" theme: As a user, I want to be able to change my password, so that I can...

Today we had our iteration planning meeting. It was a long one as we're trying to sharpen our user story technique and are switching estimation methodologies from hours to "story points" or "NUTs" (back to them). We managed to wrangle some ill-defined stories into the standard...