Australian Scrum Community

Agile Adoption Patterns – Amr Elssamadisy

To confess I was sent this book as a freeby from the publisher, the author used to work for ThoughtWorks whom I work for, and I like books on agile stuff. So you can read this with some skepticism. Honestly though if it wasn’t worth it I wouldn’t bother writing something on it. This book is good. I’m glad Amr took the time to write it.

Amr’s book is about adopting agile practices. If you adopt scrum then you inherently pick up a bunch of practices and this book can help you understand why you have this core set and what it is doing for you – in case you missed it.

If you want to help your team(s) or your company grow or mature in agile software development this book can help you decide where to go and how to get there.

So what does Amr have to say:
“Learning is the bottleneck” “All agile practices … help the team learn fast. By cycling in every possible practice, Agile teams accelerate learning, addressing the bottleneck of software engineering.”

To help you craft your adoption strategy there is a section on “Business Value” and another on “Smells”. Then you get some nice diagrams showing you how maximise the former and blow away the latter using a combination of agile practices.

After helping you define the strategy you the get some nice pattern style descriptions of the practices. There over 30 practices described, such as “Done state”, “Retrospective”, “Self-organising team”.

The back end contains a couple of case studies to help tie the story together.

Scrum is delightfully vague about a lot of other practices that XPers, and Crystal Clear folks might adopt. If you are looking to help your teams adopt more practices this is a great place to start.

Amr writes lucidly and from experience. The language is clear, as is the purpose. There are other books on Agile that are utter rubbish, this is not. The book is well targetted at people with some experience in agile software development, so there is little hand holding in this. If you’ve done more than 2 sprints you’ll be fine with this book.

As Lachlan recent blogged, Ken Schwaber has a new Scrum book out. As its title, The Enterprise and Scrum suggests, this book is primarily focused on the challenges of top-down Scrum rollouts in large organisations. Such a rollout is called an ‘Enterprise Transition Project’ and is managed (surprise, surprise) as a Scrum project. Don’t just assume that this isn’t relevant to you in a smaller organisation and/or Scrum implementation. Must of this is relevant to anyone seeking to transition to Scrum or expand it to multiple teams and/or projects.

Ken sent me a draft of this book some months ago. At the time, I was hoping that it would continue where the papers variously titled A CIO’s Playbook for Achieving Software Agility with Scrum and A Playbook for Adopting the Scrum Method of Achieving Software Agility left off. Specifically, I was hoping for a more extensive set of ‘Impediments and Change’ descriptions that incomplete versions of the latter paper included. Whilst this problem-consquences-solutions material does not appear in the book, there is plenty of guidance in other (perhaps less prescriptive) forms.

The book is divided into three parts:

• Part I is titled ‘Adopting Scrum’ and provides an excellent outline of a scalable process for transitioning to Scrum along with description of some of the likely challenges (most of which is relevant to small-medium sized organisations as well as large ones). This includes a month-by-month activity description and some examples in the form of stories about ‘hypothetical’ companies.
• Part II goes into more detail by outlining several specific practices addressing Organisational, Engineering, People, and Product Owner – Team Relationship issues. Each practice answers a question that might well be asked by someone involved in a transition project.
• Part III provides an extremely concise and authoritative overview of the Scrum process, terminology, related reading and an example Scrum Kickoff Meeting Agenda. This is followed by ‘Scrum Musings’ – a series of 1-2 page essays on important concepts behind Scrum.

Generally, I found that this book flows better than the first two books and is no less as inspiring a read. It also reflects the current maturity of Scrum in a number of subtle ways including the terminology used. One example that happens to be topical to a colleague of mine is that this book repeatably uses the terms Product Manager/Customer together so as to be explicitly inclusive of both product development and bespoke/internal application development projects. In this way, it comes across as clearer and more inclusive that the earlier literature.

Judging by how much I got out of it, I would say that you certainly don’t have to be doing an Enterprise-wide Scrum rollout to make this book well worth reading. You could expect though to get even more out of it once you go beyond one Scrum team and/or project to the challenges of co-ordinating multiple.

Keep in mind that this is a short book at 145 pages and coverage is concise and not exhaustive. The brevity does make it quick to read though.

Whilst I would not say that The Enterprise and Scrum” is essential for all ScrumMasters concerned with only a single team and project, it could be considered essential reading for anyone dealing with multiple projects or pursuing wider adoption of Scrum within an organisation. For some, the introductory material on the challenges and steps to transition to Scrum and the Appendices may be worth the purchase price on their own as it constitutes perhaps the most definitive and usable short reference currently available on the Scrum process and terminology.

See also Mike Cohn’s review.

This is the new book by Ken Schwaber another one for the scrum bookshelf.

All details here are from Amazon.

Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Microsoft Press (June 13, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0735623376
ISBN-13: 978-0735623378

The Enterprise and Scrum at Amazon.com

Scrum Trainer Joseph Pelrine and psychologist Ben Fuchs have just given a presentation at the Software Practice Advancement 2007 conference titled Turning Up The Heat on Agile Projects. An outline of the presentation has been blogged by Cincom Smalltalk product manager James Robertson.

I think it is very interesting to reflect on which of the three stages of consciousness you and your colleagues enter into when dealing with conflict. The three stages described are:

• Pre-Conventional
• Conventional
• Post-Conventional

You can read about these in more detail in an article titled A Multi-Paradigmatic View of Working with Conflict (PDF) which was co-authored by Ben Fuchs.

If you want to read further on dealing with conflict through conversation, I can highly recommend Difficult Conversations from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard. The understanding on the different levels at which such conversations operate plus the five-step checklist it provides tools than I think can benefit us all in our day-to-day work.

Update: adjusted the URL to the paper on conflict.

Following on somewhat from my last post, Melburnian James Ladd recently posted a comprehensive review of Getting to Yes. This is a book about negotiation that was mentioned at a recent XP meeting in Melbourne. Two of the three authors also contributed to Difficult Conversations. I am yet to pick this one up but from James’ outline it certainly sounds worthwhile.