Great Intro for Product Managers
Rating:
5 / 5
I've been a product manager for longer than I care to mention. Although I've always had good relationships with engineering, I have always looked for ways to have better, ongoing dialogue with the team. I am very much looking forward to applying the ideas from Mike Cohn's book. I think it will provide faster, cleaner, and less bureaucratic requirements -- but most importantly, better communication between the product management and engineering organizations and better products.
Are User Stories the 13th XP Practice?
Rating:
5 / 5
Communication, simplicity, feedback and courage! Yes, I can confirm that Mike Cohn succeeds in presenting User Stories that build on these XP values. User Stories could even be considered the 13th XP practice, because without stories, it's difficult to "get away with" the other 12 XP practices.
The book is well structured and easy to read. The golden nuggets of the book are definitely the six attributes for creating good stories. Experienced with Agile development, I immediately used the attributes (with the appropriate acronym INVEST) with great satisfaction in conversations with my customers to identify and analyse stories. It was refreshing to find out how easy it is to explain User Stories within 20 minutes. You only need a whiteboard, and INVEST as your checklist. But above all, because INVEST is lightweight and flexible it challenges you and your customer to create great stories. And bottom line, people make great stories; procedures and tools are only enablers, as they should be!
This book is a must read for business analysts and developers on an Agile development team. I highly recommend this book also to all stakeholders who need, or want, to be aware of what the Agile software development approach means on a day-to-day basis for delivering non-trivial software solutions.
Overall, Agile development is always focused on maximizing your Return On Investment with software development. Therefore I consider this book as a minimum investment to ensure maximum return from each person involved in creating successful stories!
Highly Recommended
Rating:
5 / 5
This book is one of the most readable, compact, interesting, and well-written technical books that I've read in a long time. You can easily take it with you, which is a nice change compared to many books out there. The author's writing style is very clear. The layout is professional. The content is high quality. Being a developer who hasn't had the chance to work on a "true" agile project, I can recommend this to others who are just trying to find out what user stories are all about. The chapter comparing user stories to other requirements gathering techniques and the one on reasons to use user stories are particularly valuable. There is also great information about estimation and acceptance testing.
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