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User Story Confusion: Creating and Breaking Them Down
This the third book in the Carnsa Development series and is an ideal follow-up to the Agile Confusion story. It is a quick introduction to the story mapping technique to create user stories and approaches that can be considered when breaking them down small enough to fit into a sprint (includes slicing).
In this book, the Carnsa family have been running Agile projects successfully for a while, but Claudia has noticed that user stories deemed too complex are not selected. Claudia realises she needs to give her family (who represent the Agile development team) options to conside before user story abandonment.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 27, 2021
To clarify, for those not familiar with Chris Lewis’s Carnsa family series of books, a “user story” in this context refers to an Agile application of workflow development, for practice in business and the workplace. A “story” is a statement with an objective; a single sentence identifying a problem, action and goal, with the overall intention of creating a Kanban-style workflow from it.
Incredibly for a book of less than 10,000 words, I can’t really work out if User Story Confusion is too long or too short; either too in-depth or not enough. I think the contradiction here can be attributed respectively to its two core elements of the fictional and the educational: the former is too prominent; the latter not enough. Regarding the fictional side of the book, I actually thought this made it a little wordy, and overall the narrative confused rather than assisted clarifying its message. It is a lean model industry guide, which appeared to be aimed at young readers, or perhaps an endearing training style manual for novice learners, yet in fact the narrative overly complicates the training. In this respect, then, it is very difficult to ascertain who the book is aimed at. I consider myself to be clever enough, but I did struggle a bit with this premise. Whilst I understand it, to do so took work, if I am honest. The sentiment is clear, but rather less so the application.
Looking at it from the educational point of view, I don’t think it delves anywhere near deep enough. Were the narrative significantly streamlined, and the subject presented in a more conventional training guide style, it would have had more value. Additionally, had the whole concept of the user story in the context of Agile application been covered much more comprehensively, then the book would have been very clear in its objective, which perhaps wasn’t the case here. I won’t fault Lewis for the work, clearly a notable amount of which has gone into producing the book, and I admit that I haven’t read the first two in the series, so may be missing some important context – but then, of course, a manual/reference style book should be standalone in nature, so you can just grab it when required and recap what you have learnt. This book may be of some help to those who are seeking clarification of the user story workflow-devising process, but certainly not the novice. And to summarize, it could and should perhaps have gone much farther. If you are to get the maximum potential from this book, I would argue that it might be necessary to cut a good deal of the noise from its fictional narrative, as well as the analogies and metaphors of the smaller narratives within it.
Incredibly for a book of less than 10,000 words, I can’t really work out if User Story Confusion is too long or too short; either too in-depth or not enough. I think the contradiction here can be attributed respectively to its two core elements of the fictional and the educational: the former is too prominent; the latter not enough. Regarding the fictional side of the book, I actually thought this made it a little wordy, and overall the narrative confused rather than assisted clarifying its message. It is a lean model industry guide, which appeared to be aimed at young readers, or perhaps an endearing training style manual for novice learners, yet in fact the narrative overly complicates the training. In this respect, then, it is very difficult to ascertain who the book is aimed at. I consider myself to be clever enough, but I did struggle a bit with this premise. Whilst I understand it, to do so took work, if I am honest. The sentiment is clear, but rather less so the application.
Looking at it from the educational point of view, I don’t think it delves anywhere near deep enough. Were the narrative significantly streamlined, and the subject presented in a more conventional training guide style, it would have had more value. Additionally, had the whole concept of the user story in the context of Agile application been covered much more comprehensively, then the book would have been very clear in its objective, which perhaps wasn’t the case here. I won’t fault Lewis for the work, clearly a notable amount of which has gone into producing the book, and I admit that I haven’t read the first two in the series, so may be missing some important context – but then, of course, a manual/reference style book should be standalone in nature, so you can just grab it when required and recap what you have learnt. This book may be of some help to those who are seeking clarification of the user story workflow-devising process, but certainly not the novice. And to summarize, it could and should perhaps have gone much farther. If you are to get the maximum potential from this book, I would argue that it might be necessary to cut a good deal of the noise from its fictional narrative, as well as the analogies and metaphors of the smaller narratives within it.
September 1, 2022
This book was very confusing, unless you've read the previous book(s). The general concepts of user stories are poorly explained or unexplained, someone new to the topic would not benefit from this. Unfortunately a huge miss, since I got this for my team with no previous experience of User Stories.
February 12, 2021
Our Carnsa family is back and this time you will learn about user stories. If you have difficulties processing information and breaking it into small and understandable sections, then this is the right book for you.
‘’ Their walls displayed various reports that included burndown charts and management dashboards to track progress. ‘’ However, there are better ways to create simple user stories.
Once more, you will be able to find several quizzes, illustrations and tips for you to improve. This way you can improve ways to support the development team and create correctly user stories. This fictional family will help you a lot through explanations during their dialogues.
Get ready to finally use this technique correctly and without any doubts, Lewis wrote a simple yet detailed book as the previous ones.
‘’ Their walls displayed various reports that included burndown charts and management dashboards to track progress. ‘’ However, there are better ways to create simple user stories.
Once more, you will be able to find several quizzes, illustrations and tips for you to improve. This way you can improve ways to support the development team and create correctly user stories. This fictional family will help you a lot through explanations during their dialogues.
Get ready to finally use this technique correctly and without any doubts, Lewis wrote a simple yet detailed book as the previous ones.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews