Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories Paperback – Illustrated, October 15, 2014

When reading this book I could easily place myself in presented situations - real-life examples.Authors are definitely practitioners. There’s no better way to learn about stuff than from practitioners.

Topics are covered in a clear way, with very few typos; you get "what has worked" as opposed to "what we think should work" which is refreshing; you also get the impression "devs", "UX practitioners" and such are using experiments to guess the best projects they should be working on, as they are so poorly defined by the business side.They could have made an effort to cover a couple of topics required to understand the gist of the book, to widen its appeal, even if you can find them online. The only negatives are that the authors are so immersed in their topic they have developped their own jargon, so "user stories" mean "system requirements" for everyone else, even if it's important to understand why they use these terms; and no one has "users" but "customers", which has implications for businesses, the narrative and those same "user stories".

There are tons of ideas on how to use user stories in your development process and goes in to somewhat detail on how to implement it. It definitely assumes you are doing some iterative development but my team is doing Kanban so I wish it talked more about how it fits in to that flow based system. It does mention Kanban a few times, however.Overall I found it very useful in figuring out how to break down user stories, apply impact mapping and goals along with user stories, how to measure through rolling average time analysis and T-shirt sizes instead of story points, and comes with examples of how Gojko's teams have done so.

Great ideas to make user stories meaningful, point to the real value your users want, and fit into an iteration.I enjoyed the format, which is a lot like software design patterns -- there is a context that describes the problem, a brief description of the solution, and then a section that shows how to apply the solution, along with warnings for when the solution may not be applicable.The book is quite slim, but as I read it I had a sense that the authors had gone to great lengths to cut each idea down to its essential elements. I also got the sense that the experience (evidence) behind each idea is considerably deeper than each brief synopsis might imply. I suppose they could have piled on the evidence and written a much heavier tome, but it wouldn't necessarily have been more convincing because in the end you have to try these out for yourself to see if they will work for you. I appreciated the effort they put into getting right to each point.

The book is "OK". I was really looking forward to this book, but I found the writing style challenging at best. There is some very good material in the book, so I'd still recommend it, but at times the authors seemed to ramble or stretch to reach 2 pages for each "quick idea".

Although I have been writing user stories for over five years, Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories augmented my ability to write more descriptive user stories resulting in easier estimation. The second section which discusses Splitting User stories also provided me additional insight into some creative ways that I never thought of. One of the last parts of the book suggests two ways of estimating stories that I never heard of and make sense. I plan to use practically everything I learned from reading this book. I strongly recommend this easy reading book for anyone who writes, splits, and/or estimates user stories.

Its a good bock that explains in a practical way how to get better results from agility from the use of user stories. It explains very power tool and conceps that today very much companies should consider. For example the validation of outcome with real users, between a lot of other powerfull concepts.

Very informative and not over the head of someone with little experience in the area.