Mike Agile Software Development by Mike Cohn
Mike Cohn is known guru in Agile movement, finally I have opportunity to review this book.
Author starts of the discussion about estimation and how hard it is to make honest and real estimation , basic on very dynamic requirements.
Author explains reasons behind using story cards and what to notice about velocity as output of work.
Mr Cohn clearly define what is good ёstory, meaning as work task.
Well, this interesting approach thinking about user roles.
The book author discusses, how to gather requirements and how to make them honest and valid, because with time some user requirements get invalid, reason? Well as client business grows, some requirements change and as always this is a challenge for the client software developers, they accumulate tech debt and after some years very complex and hard to maintain systems arise.
Testing is very important topic and this book covers it too.
The chapter about working with stories, is great, true mastery to manage story requirements, know how to split them how to communicate to client what actually going on in the development , all descriptions are clear and very good explained.
I liked a lot the discussion about sprint review and that goal of the sprint review to show results of work.
No new requirement, features added only product shown.
Author describes working with story cards, there some challenges when you team is not in one location, but it’s totally possible to maintain fast communication via websites like wiki or any other CMS systems.
Let me quote wha the good story is:
“Story
A user can do a basic simple search that searches for a word or phrase in both the author and title fields.
A user can search for books by entering values in any combination of author, title and ISBN.
A user can view detailed information on a book. For example, number of pages, publication date and a brief description.
A user can put books into a “shopping cart” and buy them when she is done shopping.
A user can remove books from her cart before completing an order.
To buy a book the user enters her billing address, the shipping address and credit card information.
A user can rate books from 1 (bad) to 5 (good). The book does not have to be one the user bought from us.
A user can write a review of a book. She can preview the review before submitting it. The book does not have to be one the user bought from us.
An administrator needs to approve or reject reviews before they’re available on the site.
A user can establish an account that remembers shipping and billing information.
A user can edit the credit card information stored in her account.
A user can edit the shipping and billing addresses stored in her account.”
Finaly, this book overall not bad it show how to adopt stories to a given requirements it provides insight how to interact with product owners and how to estimate the work and how to organize teams , so that they stay productive throughout the development.
Can I recommend this book? Yes , this book would definitely help you, if you are scrum master and or tech lead or even manager, for programmers it maybe a light read, without big technical details, but I would recommend to read it, most certainly a must buy!