Books on Scrum and Agile Project Management
Written by South African Agile coaches Samantha Laing and Karen Greaves, “Coach’s Guide to Agile Requirements” is a book on how to teach the concepts of Agile requirements. It provides a complete plan to run a workshop where people can learn how to elicit, refine and organize requirements in an Agile way.
In his book Agile Reflections, Robert Galen has aggregated multiple articles that he wrote about transitioning to Agile for the online publication PM Times. The book is based on his experience as in Agile coach helping companies in different phases of their transition to Agile software development.
If you asked software developers about Agile, there are chances that a majority will discuss it with words like “Scrum”, “sprints” or “retrospectives”. However Agile is not just a collection of techniques and practices, but it is more a state of mind or a culture. This is the topic of this book written by Pollyanna Pixton, Paul Gibson and Niel Nickolaisen.
If you are following an Agile approach to project management like Scrum, you should have adopted a continuous improvement practice. Retrospectives are the name of the meeting when the Scrum team makes a pause to think on how to improve its current. Fun Retrospectives is a book that should help you to animate these meetings.
Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward” is a book that aims to provides some techniques that will help teams starting to adopt an Agile approach to software development to solve some of the issues they will face. If your team is tempted to get back to the traditional project management approach, you will find material in this book to continue your journey towards Agile.
Retrospectives are certainly one of the most important techniques used in Scrum as they form the foundation of the continuous improvement and adjustment to the context for the Scrum team. It is however not always easy to facilitate this activity with a bunch of software developers that are often mostly introverted.
Implementing Scrum is difficult and there might be nothing better than taking time and making mistakes to adopt Agile successfully. This being said, ” Scrum Shortcuts without Cutting Corners” by Ilan Goldstein is a book that can help you to choose better trails when you explore some of the Scrum practices.