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Agile Software Development with Scrum View Larger Image | Ken Schwaber, Mike Beedle
Prentice Hall, Paperback, Published October 2001, 176 pages, ISBN 0130676349 | List Price: $43.00
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Summary
“Agile development methods are key to the future of flexible software systems.
Scrum is one of the vangards of the new way to buy and manage software development
when business conditions are changing. This book distills both the theory and
practive and is essential reading for anyone who needs to cope with software
in a volatile world.”
—Martin Fowler, industry consultant and CTO, ThoughtWorks
“Most executives today are not happy with their organization's ability
to deliver systems at reasonable cost and timeframes. Yet, if pressed, they
will admit that they don't think their software developers are not competent.
If it's not the engineers, then what is it that prevents fast development at
reasonable cost? Scrum gives the answer to the question and the solution to
the problem.”
—Alan Buffington, industry consultant, former Present, Fidelity Systems
Company
Arguably the most important book about managing technology and systems development
efforts, this book describes building systems using the deceptively simple process,
Scrum. Readers will come to understand a new approach to systems development
projects that cuts through the ocmplexity and ambiguity of complex, emergent
requiremetns and unstable technology to iteratively and quickly produce quality
software.
BENEFITS
Learn how to immediately start producing software incrementally regardless
of existing engineering practices or methodologies
Learn how to simplify the implementation of Agile processes
Learn how to simplify XP implementation through a Scrum wrapper
Learn why Agile processes work and how to manage them
Understand the theoretical underpinnings of Agile processes
Features
Thorough description of Scrum practices.
Illustrates how Agile processes work and how to manage them.
Large number of end-to-end case studies.
Shows a wide range of people and projects have been successful using Scrum.
Author Bio
Ken Schwaber is president of Advanced Developement Methods (ADM), a company
dedicated to improving the software development practice. He is an experienced
software developer, product manager, and industry consultant. Schwaber initiated
the process management product revolution of the early 1990's and also worked
with Jeff Sutherland to formulate the initial versionsl of the Scrum development
process.
Mike Beedle, an experienced software development practitioner, is the founder
and CEO of e-Architects, Inc., a management and technical consulting company
that helps its clients develop software in record time. Beedle has contributed
to thousands of software products for the last 20 years, and has used, recommended,
and guided others to implement Scrum since 1995.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction.
2. Great Ready for Scrum!
3. Scrum Practices.
4. Applying Scrum.
5. Why Scrum?
6. Why Does Scrum Work?
7. Advanced Scrum Applications.
8. Scrum and the Organization.
9. Scrum Values.
PREFACE
This book was written for
several audiences. Our first audience is application development managers that
need to deliver software to production in short development cycles while mitigating
the inherent risks of software development. Our second audience is the software
development community at large. To them, this book sends a profound message: Scrum
represents a new, more accurate way of doing software development that Is based
on the assumption that software is a new product every time that it is written
or composed. Once this assumption is understood and accepted, it is easy to
arrive at the conclusion that software requires a great deal of research and creativity,
and the therefore it is better served by a new set of practices that generate
a self-organizing structure while simultaneously reducing risk and uncertainty.
Finally, we have also written this book for a general audience that includes
everyone involved in a project where there is constant change and unpredictable
events. For this audience Scrum provides a general-purpose project management
system that delivers, while it thrives on change and adapts to unpredictable
events.
Software as “ new product” as present in this book, is radically
different from software as “manufactured product”, the standard
model made for software development throughout the last 20 years. Manufacture-like
software methods assume that predictability comes from defined and repeatable
processes, organizations, and development roles; while Scrum assumes the process,
the organization, and the development roles are emergent but statistically predictable,
and that they arise from applying simple practices, patterns and rules. Scrum
is in fact much more predictable and effective than manufacturing-like processes,
because when the Scrum practices, patterns and rules are applied diligently,
the outcome is always; 1) higher productivity, 2) higher adaptability, 3) less
risk and uncertainty, and 4) greater human comfort.
The case studies we provide in this book will show that Scrum doesn't provide
marginal productivity gains like process improvements that yield 5-25% efficiencies.
When we say Scrum provides higher productivity, we often mean several orders
of magnitude higher i.e. several 100 percents higher. When we say higher adaptability,
we mean coping with radical change. In some case studies, we present cases where
software projects morphed from simple applications in a single domain to complex
applications across multiple domains: Scrum still managed while providing greater
human comfort to everyone involved. Finally, we show through case studies that
Scrum reduces risk and uncertainty by making everything visible early and
often to all the people involved and by allowing adjustments to be made
as early as possible.
Throughout this book we provide 3 basic things: 1) an understanding of why
this new thinking of software as new product development is necessary, 2) a
thorough description of the Scrum practices that match this new way of thinking
with plenty of examples, and 3) a large amount of end-to-end case studies that
show how a wide range of people and projects have been successful using Scrum
for the last 6 years.
This last point is our most compelling argument: The success of Scrum is overwhelming.
Scrum has produced by now billions of dollars in operating software in domains
as varied as finance, trading, banking, telecommunications, benefits management,
healthcare, insurance, e-commerce, manufacturing and even scientific environments.
It is our hope that you, the reader of this book, will also enjoy the benefits
of Scrum, whether as a development staff member whishing to work in a more predictable,
more comforting, and higher producing environment, or as a manager desiring
to finally bring certainty to software development in your organization.
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