Review of The Scrum Field Guide: Practical Advice for Your First Year
ISBN: 9780321554154
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The Scrum Field Guide should not be your resource for learning and/or beginning to implement Scrum. It is the book you should turn to when you need to rescue your Scrum implementation. This is a practical approach to the more common obstacles that a Scrum implementation will encounter. The title of the first chapter sums it up succinctly: Scrum: Simple, Not Easy. |
Review
Scrum is the project management portion of Agile development. At a generic level, Scrum gives management the tools to monitor and track the progress of the favorite flavor of Agile development whether XP, TDD, etc. The Scrum Field Guide is geared mainly towards Scrum Masters, core team members or managers wanting to put their project back on track.
Every chapter can stand-alone and be read in any order. Each chapter begins with a story to help the reader draw parallels between the topic that the chapter addresses and the difficulties the reader is facing in their environment. Often, the symptoms of the different challenges can hide the root cause. From how to get recalcitrant core team members on board with using Scrum to recover Sprint Retrospectives turned gripe sessions, this book covers it all. The chapters are short in terms of page length because they are meant to offer ready-made and practical advice on common issues with the topic at hand rather than offer a detailed examination of each aspect of implementing Scrum.
Purchase this book when you get back from Scrum training or when you buy the book on how to implement Scrum. Put it on your shelf and refer to it when Scrum gets hard or just doesn't seem to work as advertised. This book will not teach you how to implement Scrum, it will help you save your implementation. Scrum's simple, but simple is not always easy!
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