In this chapter, we took a look at why the traditional requirements document doesn't lend itself well to adaptive planning techniques.

User Stories represent a much more human approach to gathering requirements because they focus on the need of the person we're writing software for and less on the technical outcome. They are deliberately designed to generate conversation with the people we are building software for, making the experience much more collaborative.

Defining discrete achievable outcomes for our customer gives us a platform for breaking down requirements into more manageable chunks so that we can deliver them incrementally. This enables us to prioritize work in a way that wasn't possible with the traditional requirements document. This makes the Product Backlog a much more dynamic set of user requirements. Part of the skill of the Product Owner...