Book Review: User stories Applied

Do you want to understand User stories ? You can’t go wrong with User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development by Mike Cohn .

As of this writing, out of the 45 people who reviewed this book on Amazon, 35 people have given it 5 stars and 9 have given it 4 stars. And I would say those 35 reviewers are spot on.

In my organization, we started going Agile few months ago and in the process, we started writing Stories . And this is the part where I have struggled the most. And now I am feeling so much better having read this book.  I am sure there will be many who agree with me that writing good stories is an art not very widely understood.

And this is where Mike comes in. Like someone commented on Amazon review-

This is the Bible for User Stories !!!

Mike also talks in details about the requirement gathering exercise and why the traditional ways don’t works. He compares the requirement gathering to be more like trawling- where requirements are discovered over a period of time with repeated discussion and constant feedback from the product owners and users. I liked this analogy very much !

This book covers Stories pretty extensively. There is hardly any question about stories which is not discussed here.

Should you keep stories after you have developed them?Should you use an electronic catalog or a physical cards?

How do you identify the users of a story?

How is a story different from use cases and other traditional documents ?

Stories for bugs

Defining constraints in stories

Working with User proxies

Planning iterations and releases.

Each chapter is structured very efficiently. To the point. A brief summary follows at the end for future reference . There is also a  a comparison between Developer’s responsibilities and Customer’s responsibilities- which I found quite helpful.

I also liked Mike’s writing style. He talks to you – rather than to a wide audience . Not sure if I am able to explain what I mean

Being a technologist, its not easy for me to read a book on such a dry subject. But Mike’s pace and approach to the subject nudged me along. And oh yes, each chapter is quite small- which IMHO is the best way to write a book.

On that note, I did find sometimes left wanting for more. Sometimes I got the feeling that only the surface was scrapped and wished the chapters were a bit more detailed.

I skipped the last part of the book which takes an example project and goes through the whole life cycle by writing and estimating stories. Example code and case studies do not go well with me while reading a book. I am sure who appreciates that style of writing will like these chapters- its just not for me.

Another things that I would have appreciated more was some help in transitioning from old school of doing requirements to new ones. Mike draws a good constraint but doesn’t really offer suggestion on how to transition to writing stories

Overall- I have a huge nod for this book and would recommend to anyone who wants to understand how to write stories.

I especially liked Mike’s subtle reference that he wrote this book using stories. Stories can be used not only for software development but many other projects where you want to develop incrementally and iteratively delivering value to your customer.

Here is a thought- Try writing stories for your next home improvement project

And Mike , thanks for this wonderful book !

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