Recommended reading for Agile

[Baron Schwartz]

Hi all,

Can anyone suggest a few books for Agile, Scrum, Kanban? Is there such
a thing as THE BOOK for any of these areas?

Thanks,
Baron

[Brian Carver]

Here are a few.

Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum 

By Mike Cohn

User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development

By Mike Cohn

Agile Estimating and Planning

By Mike Cohn

Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love

By Roman Pichler

[Delia Lunsford]

Thanks!

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[Jeff V]

Hello all,

I'll say one thing here first: There is no Agile. That is to say, there is no one defined Agile process/approach/method, but there are plenty of Agile brands/labels/approaches, such Scrum, Kanban, and Lean. So, there is definitely no "The Book for Agile".

Version One surveys the Agile field every year. Their most recent survey is here: http://www.versionone.com/state_of_agile_development_survey/11/. Year after year, I find that most people mean Scrum when they say Agile. But many of the same folks are using Extreme Programming (XP) with Scrum to be successful (or should!). So you'll see references to Scrum/XP hybrid. In these cases Scrum is driving the team culture and XP is driving the engineering practices. In any case, the survey itself is a great place to start when thinking about Agile -- it talks about what people are actually doing in the field, how much of it they are doing, why they are doing it, and what actual practices they are using.

My thoughts on books:

I second Succeeding with Agile by Cohn. It's very well regarded, and should probably be called Succeeding with Scrum. Cohn has tons of great material on his website: http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/ -- presentations, papers, products, etc.

Also be aware that Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber (basically the Scrum creators) maintain a Scrum Guide. It's concise at about 15 pages, and a very good starting point for reading about Scrum. See: http://www.scrum.org/scrumguides.

Overall Scrum is tricky because it's deceptively simple, and yet so hard to do well, which is probably why something spelled out as simply as in the Scrum Guide in 15 pages has dozens of 400+ page books...

David Anderson literally wrote the book on Kanban in software. See here: http://www.amazon.com/Kanban-Successful-Evolutionary-Technology-Business/dp/0984521402

Kanban is often talked about hand-in-hand with Lean... The seminal book on Lean is probably Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit by Mary and Tom Poppendieck, although they have a newer book: Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are not the Point

Henrik Kniberg recently wrote an excellent book that looked at how he applied Lean thinking to a large government project in Sweden. Henrik's team combined practices from several agile disciplines to achieve success. And he has great appendixes that nutshell the practices that contributed to their culture. This book has gotten great reviews from key Agile luminaries and I agree with them. http://www.amazon.com/Lean-Trenches-Managing-Large-Scale-Projects/dp/1934356859

Other thoughts:

Udayan Banerjee created a very nice, succinct timeline of how Agile developed on his blog earlier this year and who are/were the key players: https://setandbma.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/agile-history/. It's very useful in helping to understand where things came from, and see how the methodologies build on each other. Agile alliance has an even more detailed list: http://guide.agilealliance.org/timeline.html.

Hope some of this is useful...

Jeff

On Wednesday, June 20, 2012 3:59:32 PM UTC-4, Baron Schwartz wrote:

[Cheryl Chucoski]

We mustn't forget Esther Derby's Agile Retrospectives: Making good teams great. 

The ScrumMasters at VGT did a book club on Agile Coaching by Rachel Davies and we all wished we had read it before we became ScrumMasters!

Sent from my iPhone

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