Agile Software Development with SCRUM
Ken Schwaber
Mike Beedle

£40.26

buy from amazon

This books seems to be aimed at people who don't really know about Scrum - which seems odd given how well known Scrum has become. I guess in a way this book is a victim of it's own success.

Chapter headings like "get ready for scrum", "scrum practises" and "applying scrum" led me to think I was buying a practical , how-to book. While I do have a much clearer idea now of what scrum involves, I don't feel that at the end of reading it I would be able to run a project using scrum.

Much of the book is made up of case studies, examples of scrum practise in action, and exhortations to move from the bad old ways to scrum.

The case studies are all large projects (often multiple teams running for years), and all seem to be in-house development.

The book suggests that people trying scrum take on the whole thing first time, and make adjustments only after they have experience. This seems odd to me - it goes against the grain of the agile approach. Many good working practises get taken on because you can just try a bit and then get infected with the idea (test driven design).

Having said that it has been an interesting read - and I have a much clearer idea of how to implement scrum now than I did before.