Matt McAvoy Book Review

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.