About
First, thank you for checking out this new site. My name is Mike Cohn and I am the author of User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development (and of Agile Estimating and Planning). As someone who makes a living teaching agile courses (such as the Certified ScrumMaster class) and who has written a book on user stories, I am frequently asked to give my opinion about which of the various product backlog management tools is best. Unfortunately, although I work with many, many agile teams I am not in a good position to recommend any one tool as "the best."
By teaching classes and coaching teams I certainly hear from those I work with about which tools they like and dislike. But I rarely get to go hands-on with many of the tools for as long as I would need to give a very useful opinion. My inability to very forcefully state "this is the best tool" or even "this is the one I strongly prefer" lead to the first goal of this site:
- Provide a place where those who do work hands-on with the various product backlog / user story management tools can provide opinions.
Over the course of the next few weeks and months we will roll out features that will allow tool vendors to create accounts and post information about their tools here. Once tools are listed, we'll add the ability to rate and review these tools. Hopefully this will help others choose the best tool for them, or at least narrow the start of their search. And, it will give me an easy answer when someone asks me to recommend a tool: I'll just point them to this site and the hopefully many reviews we'll get.
Our secondary goal for this is to to:
- Provide a place where people can see sample user stories or perhaps even entire product backlogs. It's one thing to read a book on user stories or to take a class on them, but it's another thing altogether to be able to example real user stories from a real project. This is a longer-term goal for the site and we'll likely take a break in the development after the first part (reviews) so this may not get added soon but we do plan to get it. Minimally, we'll start by making the user stories of this project and a few others available. Eventually, our goal will be to allow anyone on the site to post as many user stories as they'd like and offer them up for review. A scenario in my head is that I would like to post a set of user stories that cover all aspects of managing user logins. Any new project could then come here and download that set of user stories as a starting point.
