Agile Software Development with Scrum

by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle

This is the book I’ve been wanted for years. Until this book, the Scrum development process was not very well known and was documented only piecemeal in a couple of papers and websites. Finally, there’s a book a that covers everything you need to know to run your software project using Scrum.

Schwaber is the “Godfather of Scrum” and essentially invented the techniques; Beedle was one of the first converts to Scrum and together they definitely know their stuff.

The book covers everything from the theoretical basis for Scrum to how to organize your teams, conduct daily Scrum meetings to keep things moving along, to planning your Scrum project, to tracking the “backlog” of items that need to be completed to finish a project.

Scrum is not a rehash of another methodology. As the authors say, “Scrum is different.” Some of the things you'll learn in this book will seem counterintuitive but they work and the authors do a great job of laying out enough information to, if not fully convince you, then at least persuade you to give Scrum a try. (And once you've done that, you’ll be convinced!)

I think this book is especially important for anyone reading any of the XP books that have come out over the past two years. Scrum provides an excellent management wrapper around the techniques of XP.

This book is great because it’s only 150 pages but everything is succinct and clear––very different from some other books on project management techniques that are needlessly long.

After reading this book you will know everything needed to get started with a Scrum project––and most likely that project will be more successful with Scrum than with whatever process you're using currently.…