Product Description

Apply the principles of Scrum, one of the most popular agile programming methods, to software project management#151;and focus your team on delivering real business value. Author Ken Schwaber, a leader in the agile process movement and a co-creator of Scrum, brings his vast expertise to helping you guide the product and software development process more effectively and efficiently. Help eliminate the ambiguity into which so many software projects are borne, where vision and planning documents are essentially thrown over the wall to developers. This high-level reference describes how to use Scrum to manage complex technology projects in detail, combining expert insights with examples and case studies based on Scrum. Emphasizing practice over theory, this book explores every aspect of using Scrum, focusing on driving projects for maximum return on investment.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3414 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-10
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

About the Author
Ken Schwaber is the co-creator of Scrum. He is one of the leaders of the agile process revolution, as a signatory of the Agile Manifesto and founder and director of the Agile Alliance. He has been in the software development industry for more than 30 years and teaches and speaks at many conferences, including OOPSLA & Software Development.

Customer Reviews

It's a good overview of Agile, but feels a bit contrived
I generally like this book, and find it's content helpful. However, the examples chosen for the book focus on "broken" situations that seem to go beyond just project management and development methodology, and demonstrate that somehow magically, Scrum saves the day.

While I like the optimism and positive-thinking these examples encourage, it doesn't match reality. When I walk into a messy, complex situation, apply Scrum, and the world doesn't turn to pink roses, I'm left wondering if I did something wrong...I'm frustrated...I'm angry...I'm confused. The examples setup an expectation of outcomes that is too high to be reached generally, and I think some examples of failures and lessons learned would have rounded out this book much better.

In the real-world, "perfection is the enemy of success" and I think that's what I find missing from this book. All of the outcomes represent a perfect implementation of Scrum to solve the problem in the example.

Good intro to Scrum
Great introduction to Scrum, what situations are ripe for Scrum and examples of where it has been successful - I heartly recommend.

Our new project really benefited from this book
I've been doing .NET programming for 5 and a half years now, and have practiced Agile in various degrees - all well short of what I believe Agile methodologies recommend. I have wanted to implement many more Agile methodologies, but not yet been in a manager/CTO position to ensure that these practices would be implemented.

Recently, I have been hired to do just that with a startup company. I turned to this book to help me understand the roles, meetings and project artifacts that I need to introduce to truly have an agile development environment (Scrum in particular) as our team grows.

This book really helped me to do just that, and also did it in a way that I found to be very intuitive. By relating past experiences, Ken showed me how using Scrum - in the various positions and responsibilites - moved projects forward in positive and very visible ways. I am still reading the later chapters, and still loving it.