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Agile Software Development with SCRUM

Agile Software Development with SCRUM

List Price: $33.95
Your Price: $33.95
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Short introduction to a great system and how to get on it
Review: A very practical guide, with easy to follow steps, great motivating arguments, and a logical presentation style make this book really work, especially given its short length. I also really enjoyed the examples given of team transitions. SCRUM itself is a very useful methodology for certain types of projects, and this book makes it clear what those projects are and how to adopt it for them.

On the bad side, the style change is pretty obvious and jarring when they switch authors, and some of the other-author chapters are interesting, but not necessarily as useful.

Missing from the book is a description of how to get buy-in and how to convince folks using a current process to switch (i.e. how to make and express a logical decision between two processes). It also neglects a bunch of the people issues, such as how to prioritize in career development, training, or even team-building / morale events. The book claims to be about the people and energizing them through shipping products, but I really think that's only one part of making your developers happy. A very important one, mind you, but not the only one.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Why you've been using the wrong process control model
Review: If you've survived software projects that have gone schizophrenic after doing a lot of up-front planning, you may find that chapters 2 and 5 are worth the price of the book. Those chapters compare two process control models: the "defined" model, which is the basis for most methodologies, and the "empirical" model, which is the basis for SCRUM. Knowing the difference between these process control models, and their implications when applied to software projects, is essential when trying to understand why so many projects fall apart under pressure, and why Agile techniques, including SCRUM and XP, are improvements on the way we've been doing business.

Ignore the few faults this book has (it could have used a thorough copy-edit pass, illustrations that weren't low-res screen shots, and a complete index), and you'll be rewarded with a book that dense in timely, useful information, with case studies to back the theory up.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A must for every software development manager
Review: Let me start off with my gripe. This is not a [price] book. It is short (150 pages with about 100 of those being the meat) and the graphics look like someone printed the bitmaps from their powerpoint slides. For [price] they could have hired a graphic artist to redo them in a vector-based graphics program.
Now on to the good stuff. This book is quite practical. It provides a lot of insight into what practices the authors have found to work, what problems they solve, and *why* they solve them. The practices in this book are largely common sense and most successful projects have probably adopted at least a portion of them already. The concept is simple: reduce distractions so you can get real work done. This is missed too often in today's environment though. Requirements keep changing even multiple times in the same day.
Everyone who is managing a software development team should read this book. It will give you a good idea about what your job is (giving your people covor to work) and what it isn't (micro-managing everything with process).

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great book, wish I had it earlier
Review: SCRUM is a "light weight wrapper" of techniques to manage and guide your software projects. Actually, you could use it on a lot of other types of projects, but software is its best use.

What's unique is that it wraps around the "Design it first" school that I follow, as well as the Extreme Programming (XP) school that follows a proto-typing approach.

SCRUM provides the mechanisms for organizing and controlling the development of your software project. You develop a short list of deliverables for the next 30 days and have a series of daily meetings. Oh, there's more to it than this.

In software projects I have followed a process where the design is fully thought out in advance. I say it is 85 % accurate as I know that mid-course corrections will be made as the software is developed and delivered to the client.

On large projects we typically work in 2 week deliverables, the author suggests 30 day "sprints". We break all the projects up into many packages of deliverables. One advantage to this was the client could see progress, give on course corrections, and you'd be sure to get paid. On small projects we have not followed any formal procedures.

What SCRUM does is give me a better, more thought out process for what the author calls these 30 day "sprints." I wish I had read this book earlier.

I picked up the book at a computer store and bought it reluctantly. I had heard good things about SCRUM, but the book looked too small and a quick read at the store didn't really turn me on that much.

But after I sat down to read it at home, I was very pleased. It is a very well-underlined book now.

I agree with the XP folks on the productivity of 2 person programming teams and have found their "test first" approach to be very interesting. However, I do find that their design-on-the-fly approach to be flawed. When XP works, I think it is because it attracts good programmers... it's not the XP proto-typing approach itself. In fact, I think any methodology that relies on proto-typing wears out the goodwill of the client. The clients time is limited and they value it highly.

I will say that I found many interesting ideas in XP. And, I recommend that anyone interested in the subjec of this book, go to the XP websites and read their books (about 6 or so at this time).

SCRUM fits around XP just as well as the design-it-first approach. What I disagree with in SCRUM (and XP) is the use of open office areas for programming. I believe studies have actually been done on this and closed offices, no windows, white walls, lots of marker boards... wins out. Anything beyond trivial programming requires concentration. Noise and movement kills concentration.

The graphics in the book really suck, as they look like they were printed out in some kind of old 320x200 screen resolution. But there is great depth to this book. It's a smaller sized book with small type (but still easy-to-read). So you actually get a lot of meat.

In the future, I will refer to this great book often and recommend all software people read it.

John Dunbar
Sugar Land, TX

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Scaling Up Agile Process Effectively
Review: Scrum is the lever that can people-wise scale the development methods of XP and some of the other agile processes...

I used Scrum with a cross-functional team of 40+ people split into four smaller teams. It worked exceedingly well. We used some of the XP engineering disciplines as well, but what I love about Scrum is that it really doesn't have anything at all to do with software. You can use it for any task-oriented project that has ambiguity associated with the way the work should be done.

Scrum is IMHO the relatively undiscovered gem of the Agile Methods family. Corporate IT professionals in particular ought to learn and apply Scrum...

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A developer must have..
Review: The reader, Frank Carver (Ipswich, Suffolk United Kingdom), could not be more clueless... I've been practicing Scrum for over a year and am a certified ScrumMaster, and one of the major strengths i see is the customer's ability to drive the project (which includes being involved throughout the sprint frank). I appreciate the fact that Scrum is a management wrapper, allowing me to inject whatever engineering processes are appropriate from project to project

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A strange mixture of old and new software thinking
Review: This book is a strange mixture of trendy agile methodology and dusty corporate management. My guess is that it has been hurriedly re-edited based on an old draft to try and catch the Extreme Programming (XP) bandwagon.

Scrum is fundamentally a management technique, aimed at getting the most from development teams. As such it shares some principles with the new programming methodologies but, tellingly, many of the things which can lower the stress and help make software development fun are absent. There's no "40 hour week", developers are encouraged to put in whatever is necessary, even if it means working all night. There's no "Pair Programming", and mere programmers are actively discouraged from contacting the customers or users to get instant answers and decisions.

Where Scrum scores is in heavyweight, bureaucratic organizations, and its team isolation techniques can help to get a more extreme approach off the ground. Be prepared to abandon it like a first-stage booster if you do want to get XP into orbit, though.

The production quality of this book is poor. The illustrations are laughable pixelated screen dumps, and the same information could have been got across in a book half the size.

If you are a team leader of a project in chaos, and need a way out, this might be just what you need. But don't ever forget that your team are people, not just "resources".

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: If you want something that really works, read this book.
Review: This book is written by people who have years of practice snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, turning dying software development projects into dramatic success stories in a matter of two or three months. Perhaps you need to start with a pending disaster to be free to take the wise advice in these pages, because the approach can be quite controversial. If you are burdened with traditional project control practices, find an important project that is in deep trouble and try Scrum. You have every probability of being a hero, and the way you think about software development will be changed forever.

"Despite the method used, most everyone that delivers software to production eventually starts doing something very similar to Scrum." says Mike Beedle, and he's right. This book describes how real software is actually developed.

The highlights of the book are Chapter 2, where process control theory is applied to software development, and Chapter 6, where new product development techniques are suggested as a new paradigm for software development. The book couples a thoughtful approach with a detailed 'methodology' and many case studies.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: SCRUM: Developers' salvation!
Review: This book packed an amazing amount of information into few pages. Most importantly, Ken Schwaber provided real-life examples of what worked for him and what didn't--and explained why.

Schwaber, the primary proponent of SCRUM, and Beedle have much experience with SCRUM and share it freely. Over the years, I've worked with numerous "newfangled" approaches to programming, including XP. Without SCRUM, however, we could not realize XP's potential. SCRUM is so deceptively simple, so logical, and so effective that one wonders why it hasn't been adopted more widely. In fact, I believe that as Schwaber continues to spread his message, SCRUM will be the wave of the future.

Schwaber's and Beedle's blueprint is a must read for every software developer. Once you try it, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: SCRUM BABY
Review: This is a great hands on book for developers and development managers alike. Good analogies and case studies. Great references as well for those of us into process control theory and complexity theory. Only 150 pages makes it very readable.


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