A few words of shared understanding, i.e. a review of Jeff Patton's books User Story Mapping

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With this entry, I’d like to start a series of posts summarizing the books I’ve read.

Recently I have finished Jeff Patton’s books User Story Mapping . As we can read in the book summary, Jeff will explain the technique called user story mapping. In practice, in his book, the author shows us plenty of real-world examples, all of which serve another goal of usage story mapping and the consequences of not using it. So, we have the example of Gary, who is a music producer. Thanks to the story mapping, Gary was able to search the big picture and limit the scope of the project.

More examples discover other possible usages:

using user story mapping to coordinate work of teams
using user story mapping to better estimation
using user stories to choose features for MVP and then faster validate this MVP

In each example, Jeff smuggles a few tips on how to lead a user story workshop. Despite this, I regard this book too long and its examples too detailed. The actual content could easily fit in half of the book’s length.

For me, the main takeaway is shared understanding being the most vital. All stakeholders should understand the system goal and its features in the same way, which is more important than good written, detailed documentation.

On my scale, the book gets 3/5 . I recommend these books to every developer that would like to be more than only a coder.