Book review
It’s been a while since my last book review. But here we go again. There are some books I read during the last weeks/months and I really think these are worth having a look at.
Keogh, L.: Behaviour-Driven Development
Patton, J.: User story mapping
Daoust, N.: UML Requirements Modeling for Business Analysts
Crispin, L. & Gregory, J.: Agile Testing
Keogh, L.: Behaviour-Driven Development
You will find this book at leanpub and it is still in the making, but I think it is already worth getting if you are looking for a general introduction at BDD. While most other books (at least the ones I encountered) are usually a mixture of introduction to BDD and an instruction manual for certain tools, this one provides a broader and more general approach to the topic. It consists of three chapters so far, which deal with scenarios in general, how to find/write these and how these interact with your budget. Oh, did I mention that I absolutely love the author’s style of writing? Can’t wait for future chapters!
Patton, J.: User story mapping
User story mapping is a technique for product owners. But I strongly recommend this book to anyone who should ever get in touch with a user story (which is everyone in an agile context I suppose). It gave me tremendous input on the general topic and small, practical tips that I can’t wait to bring into action. The book is divided in four major parts dealing with the name-giving technique, how to apply this properly, how to improve a backlog and how to improve your build planning with the help of user stories. The author uses are very personal style of writing, which I really liked since he gave quite some insight how he personally dealt with the things presented and offered a bunch of useful hints.
And if you have read this to the end the following table will probably make sense to you, otherways simply ignore it.
| chapter | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| grade | A | A | B | B | B | A | A | B | A | A | A | B | A | C | C | B | A | B |
Daoust, N.: UML Requirements Modeling for Business Analysts
To be honest, I haven’t read all chapters in detail and it is not really a bedtime reading, but it has been a valuable reference book for me when I had to dig deeper into activity and state machine diagrams. In addition to a formal description useful hints and proper examples are given. Overall you will find a detailed description of 13 different diagram types and some general introduction to UML.
Crispin, L. & Gregory, J.: Agile Testing
I know, this one is a classic and rightfully so! And may I add that it is a behemoth? It really took me a while to read all of it, but it was really worth the time as it reassured me in many ways about what I am doing when testing and it certainly gave me new ideas on more than one topic. I won’t really dig into all the details here since that has been done so many times and you will probably know it already. If you don’t, don’t do it like me and hesitate for some time. Better to start reading today than tomorrow. There is a successor out by now called “more agile testing” (makes me wonder if the third part will be called “most agile testing”…), which is pretty high on my reading list.
