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Choosing an agile process – Part 6: Books and reading

So hopefully you’re not taking everything I say as the absolute truth. While that would be flattering it would also be foolish on your part. Here’s a list of references to some of the reading material we’ve covered while looking at processes for p&p.

Never “done” agile?

These are both good books that set context about agile processes and how they compare to other things you might have used. I used both these books when we were thinking about process improvement on the Visual Studio Tools for Office team.

Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager’s Guide
Craig F Larman

Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed
Barry Boehm & Richard Turner

Other books that were popular amongst the members of the team looking at process definition…

Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products
Jim Highsmith

Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams
Alistair Cockburn (pronounced co-burn)

Want to know more about XP and Scrum?

Here’s the main texts we’re considering basing our process on. This will form the core and we’ll apply deltas to it as required.

Agile Project Management with Scrum
Ken Schwaber

There’s lots of material out there on Scrum. This is sort of the companion book to the Certified Scrum course. If you’re interested in scaling scrum to large Enterprise projects then Ken has another book on that.

Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (2nd Edition)
Kent Beck & Cynthia Andres

I actually think that the first edition is a better place to start for beginners. It’s the better read for people who are Shu at XP, this is the Ha-Ri book – see Shu-Ha-Ri. Unfortunately the 1st edition is out of print.

Scrum and XP from the Trenches
Henrik Kniberg

I would totally recommend this to anyone trying Scrum and XP. It doesn’t cover the basic Scrum and XP practices, if you want to read about Scrum or XP try Ken or Kent’s books (above). It’s really an example of how a team put all this into practice. The downside being it’s how it worked in practice for them and this may not work for you!

There’s more book recommendations on the recommended reading page.

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