Reviews for Agile Software Development with SCRUM

1. Probably still the best introduction to Agile and Scrum

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, November 12st, 2009

   This was one of the first books published on Agile software techniques, and is in some ways showing its age. The quality of the diagrams is poor (although they are still perfectly understandable), and Scrum in its original form has been superseded by a variety of other techniques.
   
   But these other techniques might never have existed had it not been for Scrum, and the software development principles embodied in this book are still core to the whole ethos of Agile processes. For those reasons, this is still a key book that should be read and understood by anyone working in software development today, particularly anyone with people or project management responsibilities.
   
   Schwaber and Beedle's book is quite short and easy to read: both of which are to its benefit. That Scrum is simple enough to be described so succinctly is one of the main reasons why it works as a process, and achieved rapid widespread adoption. This is the book that introduced Scrum to the world, and more than ten years later is probably still the best introduction to the topic.
   
   Note that Scrum focuses on the project management aspects of software development. If you're looking for information on the more technical development activities, other books will serve you better; for example Kent Beck's "Extreme Programming Explained" (which again is a few years old, but still excellent).

2. Disappointed

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, August 12th, 2009

   This book has been disappointing and boring. You can find the most interesting parts also in Ken Schwaber's speech at Google Tech Talks (Scrum Et Al, September 5, 2006). Throughout the book, the authors try to sell Scrum. I wanted to learn how to use this methodology, but they kept focusing just on how cool it is for the company.
   
   Scrum is great (i suppose!) but this book is definitely NOT worth buying.
   
   Note: I didn't consider in the vote the poor quality of the figures. The resolution sometimes is so low that you can't even read what is written on the diagrams.
   

3. Excellent starting point

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, April 12th, 2009

   We decided to look at Scrum after deciding agile was the way forward but failed to implement a decent framework around it. Scrum is a very straightforward and lightweight project management framework and this book gets the principles across succinctly. I was able to pass this book over to our COO (a non-technie) and he read it and has embraced it too - between us we've been practising Scrum since, so far with good success. Following this I highly recommend you read Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn

4. Good message but poor value

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, January 12th, 2007

   I'm disappointed with this book. I hoped to find much more depth about Scrum than can be gleaned from the Web. What it has to say, it says well, and the general point (that Scrum is better) is competently argued and substantiated. The reasons I can only give three stars are: firstly, the quality of graphics is appalling (could be bettered by a six year old with a Mac Plus); secondly, the price: this book would be fine for £[...].

5. Ideas that work with new terminology

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, September 12th, 2003

   This book explains some very useful methods for delivering customer-focused solutions. Aside from a new set of terminology to get used to, the book cites the usefulness of: fast daily status meetings ("Scrums"), 'locked' 30-day iterations ("Sprints") that deliver working code at the end, small teams of 6-8 multi-skilled people, a prioritised book of work that is re-appraised every 30 days ("Backlog"), regular assessment of the work effort in the backlog rather than using a project plan, collective responsibility for delivery. I have seen people use these methods in successful projects within my company but they didn't know they were using Scrum, they were just doing things that they felt were right, have worked for them in the past and enabled them to focus on driving out a solution that would meet the real needs of the users.