Quick, Highly Effective Ideas for Writing Better Stories

by Mary Gorman and Ellen Gottesdiener

We’re big fans of the latest book from Gojko Adzic and David Evans, Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories. After all, who isn’t always looking for ways to improve? We encourage you to check it out.

Whether you’re looking for new ideas for creating stories, planning with stories, discussing stories, splitting stories, or managing iterative delivery, you’re sure to find a number of improvement ideas. Here are snippets from the reviews we wrote:

Ellen: Gojko and David’s book provides ideas that can be injected to improve, enhance, and enlighten teams and their product owners as they strive to deliver software products that deliver value…. It is a must read for any product owner and enlightens any practitioner working with user stories.

Mary: Don’t be misled by the title. The value of Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories goes beyond user stories. Its advice can improve a team’s ability to deliver software quickly. And, importantly, it provides guidance to effectively and efficiently engage stakeholders in identifying high-value business outcomes.

As we read Fifty Quick Ideas we were not surprised to see the close alignment with the practices described in our book, Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis. Stay tuned: We’ll be sharing details on how Discover To Deliver™ and Fifty Quick Ideas are aligned in an upcoming posting.