Well not actually with Mike Cohn, but with Mike Cohn books!  Mike Cohn has been around a long time in the agile space, him being an agile alliance founder and all that jazz.  Anyway, enough about Mike and more about his books:

  • User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development (2004)
  • Agile Estimating and Planning.

Let me start by saying that they are great books.  User Stories Applied is still relevant today but things have moved on a little since its gone to print but most of what he covers is excellent grounding for anyone new to user stories, as well as those requiring a refresher.  All you need is an ideal day to get through all the key points in the book. 

But Agile Estimating and Planning was really the prize winner for me.  When I started reading it, for the first few chapters where Mike explains why planning fails, I was laughing out loud.  Why? Because I had been on and ran projects that had failed for the reasons he clearly outlines in his book.  Damned I wish this book had been written 10 years ago!

Agile Estimating and Planning does not skirt around the issues but focusses on and provides good explanations, with numerous examples of how and why we should estimate and plan our projects.  Before this book, I had to battle to convince and/or demonstrate by example that the key is in planning and not the plan itself.  As Mike clearly points out, the plan is a snapshot of project progress.  How on earth can this be defined up front before a line of code has been cut and religously followed through to delivery, without continual refinement and change,  I just don’t know.  But people do it all the time.

Now I have the book to refer people to that clearly explains why we should change.  I no longer have to waste time trying to convert people.  Damned if only I had this book on a project that I fell into that the project manager, armed with Microsoft Project Plan, had tasks for every single class, I kid you not, within the system!  This was a big ole system.  You don’t want to think about the weekly status meetings we had on this global project…dull, dull, dull.  Hey Jim, you completed XmlInitParser.java.  Yep, that’s done.  How, about you Bob, you were 45% done on the RmiRetryStrategy.java?  Nah, had a registry problem.  Ten minutes later, a lot of dull implementation details, and finally, should be done tomorrow though.  Kill me now…how can you be 45% done on a class…?  It’s either done or not done!

Anyway, time for bed.  The books are great and well worth a read.  So go read them…