Book Review: User Stories Applied
Posted on November 12th, 2009 by Paul McArdle – 3 Comments.
In recent times we have been exploring various software development methodologies to correct some of the issues that have arisen.
As Shane noted with respect to the development of NEM-Watch 8, we screwed up, and caused clients unneeded angst, and ourselves unnecessary stress.
When the company started (10 years ago now), we sort of “happened upon” an iterative development methodology that worked for us, much of the time. However with employee turnover and a lack of specific focus, we were not religious in its application – leading to issues such as these.
This is one book of many on Agile that we are in the process of reviewing as one step in our strategy to refine our approach to development.
1) Binary Review
|
The Book |
What we thought |
 “User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development” by Mike Cohn |
Very good content |
| Full Disclosure – yes, that’s a tracked link to Amazon shown above. We buy quite a large number of books on a wide range of topics, all relevant to our business in some way. If you did happen to purchase the book from Amazon, they’d throw a few shekels our way, which would help us to buy (and hence publish reviews of) even more books. Hence, Karma would return the benefits to you… |
Read most of this book within a day out of the office, so it is an easy read – and very worthwhile.
2) My Point of View
Given I have not really touched code personally for 20 years or so (back before “Software Engineering” was even a discipline at university), I don’t have a full grasp of all the lingo used these days with the different development methodologies.
The nub of the issue is that this stuff just makes sense to me, intuitively – and we have seen that it works, on projects where it has been applied.
On this point, I even agree with Joel Spolsky, which does not happen all the time! Joel’s key point here (in my view) is that:
It’s taken me a while, but I finally learned that long-term deadlines (or no deadlines at all) just don’t work with professional programmers, either: you need a schedule of regular, frequent deliverables to be productive over the long term.
How crazy is it (in my view) that someone can graduate with a degree in IT or Software Engineering with not even a basic understanding of project management skills? A little removed from the “… for the real world” tagline for QUT, in my view.
From the little I have learnt in the books I have reviewed, thus far (like this one, and the “Tale of Two Systems”) it seems that the Software Engineering domain is, in a way, just catching up on project management principles used in other domains for years.
Sure, there are some differences – but probably more similarities.
Hence, I have been trying to pass on some general principles (such as begin with the end in mind, then break it into digestible pieces) but have found myself not doing a great job in conveying these principles. This is something the book does much more coherently!
I will certainly be ensuring that our “Product Managers” who should perhaps be more correctly known as “Delivering What the Customer Wants Manager” all read this book – and apply the principles.
The universities definitely are poor at teaching a number of skills required by successful software engineers. Just off the top of my head I will list some here:
1) Project management and coordination.
2) Working with large, complex applications with 50k-100k lines of code.
3) Bug finding and elimination in large applications.
There are more but these three are so vitally important to nearly all development jobs in the real world that they stand out as the biggest problems
[...] particularly liked the notion in the book “User Stories Applied” that, if we run out of room on User Story Card for an explanation of the feature, then we should [...]
[...] so (for instance, the book comes out very strongly in favour of larger documentation, as opposed to ”simpler” User Stories for [...]