Product Description

This book aims to give you a head start by providing a detailed down-to-earth account of how one Swedish company implemented Scrum and XP with a team of approximately 40 people and how they continuously improved their process over a year's time. Under the leadership of Henrik Kniberg they experimented with different team sizes, different sprint lengths, different ways of defining "done", different formats for product backlogs and sprint backlogs, different testing strategies, different ways of doing demos, different ways of synchronizing multiple Scrum teams, etc. They also experimented with XP practices - different ways of doing continuous build, pair programming, test driven development, etc, and how to combine this with Scrum.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #389410 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 140 pages

Customer Reviews

A Truly Useful Book on Agile Development
I've worked on agile teams since 2000, and have talked to many teams making the transition to agile. I've found that most people learn best through examples and hearing about other peoples' real life experiences. This book of "war stories from the trenches" is exactly what agile newbies need. I've read lots of books on agile development, and this is one of the most useful. It's superbly organized, written and illustrated. The author relates his team's experiences simply and clearly. Larger organizations with multiple teams will find valuable ideas on how to organize.

Short with lots of lessons

Henrik's "Scrum and XP from the Trenches" is a very thin book (120 pages) which can be read within half a day. It describes the experiences of Henrik when implementing Scrum in one organization with multiple teams.

First, you can decide to support the author and purchase the paper book, like I did, or you can download the free version from: http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches

Then, the book itself. It's structured fairly logically. It starts with looking at the Product Backlog, from there goes over all the Scrum meetings in chronological order. For every meeting, the author describes how he did it in his company, what other things he tried and what his conclusions were.

After all the Scrum meetings, the book dives in a couple separate topics, like combining Scrum with XP practices, having breaks between sprint and some other topics. It ends with scaling and distributed teams, common questions.

The book is basically a how-to book, though its very clear that it just gives an example, to make Scrum more concrete, but does recommend for everyone to look for "their Scrum" instead of blindly copying the suggestions in the books. This is also the books strength, it provides very concrete tips without saying "this is how it must be done".

I have different experiences than the author in some areas, which makes me frown sometimes, though I enjoyed Henriks explanations. They helped me gain a different perspective on some issues.

I was doubting between 3 and 4 stars for this book. 3 stars would be since the book doesn't offer more than it promises. It is an experience story of Henrik and didn't add much surprises or extra content. Also 3 stars since its so small. 4 stars would be because there is probably not any more concrete Scrum story than this one. If you are wondering about concrete implementation after reading Ken Schwaber's books, then this is the book for you! Also 4 starts because its small, which is also an advantage. There is no unnecessary blah blah in the book, Henrik tells how it is!

A recommended book for Scrum practitioners and people starting with Scrum to learn about "How Henrik did it!" :)

Answered my "yeah but" questions about implementing Scrum in the real world
I am familiar with this book from the online PDF version from InfoQ. Like most who are new to Scrum -having come from other frameworks- I was filled with questions that started with "yeah but..." and "what about". None of them were answered satisfactorily by any Scrum book (even those by Schwaber or Cohn) until I read Henrik's.