Exploring Scrum

Are you a software developer? Do you manage software developers? Are you using scrum? Are you thinking of using scrum? Then you must have this book by Dan Rawsthorne! Scrum is the most popular agile software development process in use today, but implementing it has proven difficult for many people. Dan and Doug wrote this book in order to help people with their implementations of Scrum. Both Dan and Doug have trained and coached thousands of people, most of whom are already using Scrum. In spite of the fact that they have read about Scrum, have been trained or coached in Scrum, and are using Scrum, their most common complaint is that they need help to do it right. And, Dan and Doug have found, many (if not most) of them need some help. This book is for them and others like them. This book is not an introductory text. Dan and Doug assume that those who read this book know, or think they know, something about Scrum. This book takes a deep, exploratory, look into the Scrum framework, and offers advice about how to think about it, and how to use it. Some of this advice is philosophical, some is pragmatic, some is practical, and some of it is controversial. The controversies happen because Dan and Doug are brutally consistent and true to the essence of Scrum. This book is not the result of an academic exercise; every suggestion or conclusion in this book is grounded in real-life issues they have encountered, and suggestions that they have made for teams and people they have coached or trained. This book contains both pragmatic advice and the philosophical underpinnings justifying that advice. Scrum is a development framework that is very demanding of its adherents. Scrum is easy to understand, but doing it successfully (one might even say ‘right’) is very difficult. Scrum’s ‘out of the box’ process is just good enough to allow Teams, Organizations, and Individuals to develop software successfully while their ‘process personalities’ are maturing and becoming more scrummish. Once their personalities have changed, then they can adapt Scrum for their own situations and realities. This book focuses on helping you become more scrummish and discusses some of the adaptations you will make as you mature.