Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams by Alan Shalloway

by Alan Shalloway

The Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams is a useful reference for Scrum teams who have had some basic training and want to use Scrum in the context of Lean. It is designed to assist the transition to effective Scrum practices that enable enterprise delivery of value to customers. While this is not a book on Lean practices, it is presented in a manner that is consistent with Lean thinking. This book collects in one spot the good practices we have learned and observed as we have trained thousands of teams in Lean and Agile software development, including Scrum. Lean-Agile covers many principles and practices. There are several flavors of Agile methods in the marketplace, Scrum being the most popular at the moment. This Pocket Guide is designed to reinforce the Lean-Agile thinking that you, as a member of a Scrum team, are developing as you use Scrum to develop software products. To get the most use of this tool, you and your team should have already had a training course, such as Implementing Scrum for Your Team by Net Objectives. Scrum is much more a way of thinking about the process of software product development, than it is a particular set of practices. This guide offers a brief review of the basic drivers and motivations of Scrum and the principles and practices that form the Lean-Agile way of thinking, which underpins Scrum. You and your team are responsible for the process you use to create products. Before you can improve, you must know how to think in this new paradigm of Lean-Agile. It will help you avoid much wasted time and effort.

Paperback

First published February 13, 2012

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of Lean-Agile, and this book does have some helpful tips and reminders if something isn't going as smoothly as you might expect in your projects.

From a book perspective though, it's too big to be a "pocket guide" (it won't fit in any of my pockets -- even cargo sized ones), and it's too disjointed to be a 200-page book. It needs more narrative to connect the ideas, and perhaps less focus on the lists.

It's a good quick reference that I'll keep around, but more because I like the authors, Net Objectives, and their ideas than for the merits alone of this book.

Disclaimer: Got the book for free at the Agile 2009 conference

[Bob Schatz]

Pretty good book. I don't always agree with everything that Alan writes, but he got this pocket guide close enough to earn a recco. Why the book has about 25% of it's content made up of 3 chapters from another one of his books confusing and I felt a little cheated. Nothing new or revolutionary, just a handy reference guide.