Australian Scrum Community

Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers. Mary Poppendieck & Tom Poppendieck
Addison-Wesley Professional; 1st edition (May 8, 2003)

Summary – You don’t need this book if you want use Scrum, but it will help you.

More – I don’t want you to get the wrong impression of this book, it’s very good and worth every cent, but for implementing Scrum you don’t need it, but it won’t hurt to read it.

The authors put forward 7 Principles for Lean Software development:
1 – Eliminate Waste
2 – Amplify Learning
3 – Decide as late as possible
4 – Deliver as fast as possible
5 – Empower the team
6 – Build integrity in
7 – See the whole

and 22 tools to help you with these principles.

There is some clear cross-over with what you try to achieve with Scrum and the principles and tools presented. All of the principles and tools will certainly help in any implementation of Scrum.

I find with many books on agile development the highlights of this one are the war stories. Reading about the success and failure of others helps to ground the ideas presented in reality.

Reviews on other sites have complained about the book having too many manufacturing examples, I didn’t find this bothersome. I have commented elsewhere on scrum.com.au that Scrum has come out of manufacturing and you can’t choose your family. If the example reinforces a point I don’t think it matters if it’s from software or manufacturing or theatre or long-distance-basket-weaving-with-sharks.

Maybe my summary was wrong, maybe you should buy this book? Perhaps it’s the lack of immediacy of this book when I contrast it with Agile Retrospectives that makes me hesitate to give the same endorsement. I wrote that it won’t hurt to buy and read it, you will probably be more successful with scrum if you do.

Lean Software Development at Amazon.

Agile Retrospectives – Making Good Teams Great. E Derby and D Larsen. 2006 – The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Summary – buy this book.

More –
If you are using Scrum, then you are carrying out sprint reviews every few weeks. After a few sessions these may start to become a little stale or there may be issues you need to help the team address that they are less forthcoming about. This book will provide you with tools to get more out of the review.

Agile Retrospectives at Amazon.

The two Scrum books on my bookshelf are:

• Agile Software Development with Scrum, Schwaber and Beedle, 2001
• Agile Project Management with Scrum, Schwaber, 2004

It’s been a while since I read them both, so no review. Are there any other Scrum books that you recommend?