Summary

In this chapter, we compared user stories with use cases and traditional requirements. We questioned whether the XP approach of writing a user story in a sentence or two and leaving the details for later conversations with the customer is a sufficiently robust approach to software development. We compared this approach with vague requirements as handled in non-XP projects.

As we hope we ve demonstrated, there are reliable means of establishing a set of requirements early in the project that are correct or very close to being correct. This isn t folklore: There are documented ways of sniffing out incorrect requirements and getting agreement from all the various customer representatives.

There are, of course, cases where the requirements just aren t known early in the project, and in such cases, agile methods can prove to be a useful supplement to effective requirements elicitation . In most cases, however, the issue is simply that the requirements are there waiting to be got at ”the team just needs to know how.

In the next chapter, we examine the notion ( prevalent in the Extremo world) that software is never done.