Scrum in Action

by Andrew T. Pham, Phuong-Van 'Kym' Pham

SCRUM IN AGILE SOFTWARE PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT is a practical how-to guide for software project teams on how to successfully deploy an Agile software framework with Scrum. It is clearly and concisely written and is the first practical guide with real world situations written by corporate practitioners. This book describes many good project management techniques on how to get the most from project teams and bridges the gaps between many Scrum and project management books by addressing how to communicate with executives using financial terms, how to use an objective estimation technique, and where software architecture fits into Scrum.

Genres: Programming

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 21, 2011

Reviews

[Frank Palardy · Rating 4 out of 5]

He goes off in other directions but ok for review.

[James · Rating 1 out of 5]

In general, I found this book to be quite a dry, bland read. It mainly discusses general development staff roles, and many fundamental aspects of agile were casually mentioned rather than going into depth (for example, I don't recall a discussion on retrospectives).

There's plenty of diagrams but I found these to be a very poor standard. Firstly, the diagrams were often pages away from where they are referenced. Secondly, they are very unclear; there's the set where the tree diagram is repeated several times with only the labels changed; so it's not clear what this is illustrating. There's a section where it describes a questionnaire where you answer with a number between 0 and 2, but then the questions are labelled 0-3. Big deal, it's a typo, but then the completed example is scored -2 to +2, further adding to the confusion.

For Planning Poker, the authors claim it isn't effective in some Asian cultures that will respect people's estimates who are in positions of authority. From my experience, if you take turns in estimating, people will try and agree with the majority and will be massively biassed towards opinions from experienced members of staff; so I wouldn't say this is a cultural difference at all. The way Planning Poker gets around this issue - is that everyone votes at the same time so it's impossible to be biassed.

At the end of the book, there are some real life applications of agile. You would think this would be useful, but all the example does is describe the implementation of a simple applications using Ruby On Rails, and even gives you an explanation of the language. Surely you don't need to know any implementation details; you just want an overview of User Stories, how the process of building it went, and issues that were addressed.

I don't see much value in this book at all.

[Vuotto Simone · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book provide some useful information and tips to start with Scrum, but it is poorly designed: it is often repetitive and generic and it contains a lot of fillers. In particular the Appendix contains two real world use cases, or pretend to: it contains a lot of irrelevant code (useless both for developers and scrum masters) and whole parts are copy pasted. The book could have been 50 to 80 pages instead of 270 without losing any information.

[Mohamed · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very nice book. It provides an overview of SCRUM development philosophy and techniques. Moreover, the second part of the book presents practical advice for those moving from classical waterfall school to SCRUM. Very good time investment for reading.

[Christian Tjhai · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like the way the authors do the estimation formula, because I agree with the cultural problem that we often faced in Asia, unless you are working with non-asian in Asia.

[Emmanuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good