Scrum Field Guide, The: Agile Advice for Your First Year and Beyond (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn))

This book was definitely informative and definitely opinionated. The book is obviously about agile development and most agile evangelists (if you've ever met one) believe that's the only way to successfully make software. That being said, agile isn't terrible if implemented correctly and in the correct situations.Some of the examples seem kind of cheesy and unrealistic... I think the author wants us to believe some of this stuff actually happened. Which I'm not sure that I believe. And I guess the examples and stories kind of break up the technical information.

This book is well written and easy to read and understand. Some of the "real-life" scenarios are unbelievably goody-goody and don't meet with my reality. Maybe there are some teams who were skeptical then after one attempt at agile were all gung-ho and saw immediate and great results, but my suspicion is that some stories are glorified or summarized to such a high level that they are unbelievable. The book is still a great intro for the novice at agile and totally worth the time to read, thus the four stars.

I prefer having books instead of online training because I like to highlight certain sections for easy review. This is a great guide for me as I'm a new Scrum Master, and while I know the basics of agile and Scrum I still need a good guide to help me through the standard Scrum ceremonies and working with my new team. I recommend this to anyone new to, or wanting to improve, Scrum and agile.

A very well written Scrum field guide. Helped to bring me up to speed on leading the dev team. Worth its weight in gold.Thank you.

The best one so far...

Excellent professional resource.

The Scrum Field Guide is an excellent practical resource to help break through the barriers of moving into the Scrum method at your workplace. My workplace, like many others, is tentatively approaching agile and scrum as it moves away from the waterfall method - it is picking and choosing the pieces of agile and scrum that it wants to use but is not boldly moving forward. In my opinion, this prevents true success with Scrum. But as we all know, it is hard to change the business paradigm quickly! And it can be frustrating along the way.This book is very helpful at helping you move through business obstacles and solidify you and your company embracing Scrum to ensure its success and to move your business forward! The chapters are short, concise, focused and interesting to read - making it easy to read a couple of chapters on the bus or at lunch time which is ideal for the current work environment and everyone's busy schedules. The book is organized into the high level sections of: Getting Prepared, Field Basics, First Aid, Advanced Survival Techniques, and Wilderness Essentials. The first 2 sections cover all the essential elements of Scrum which are very helpful in solidifying these areas. The more advanced sections are very helpful in approaching issues or areas more in depth - such as conflicts which may occur, adding new team members, outsourcing/offshoring, optimizing and measuring value, and immersive interviewing and hiring.The BEST part about this book are the "Story" sections! Mitch did an amazing job capitalizing and sharing on his extensive experience so each chapter starts with a true story from his experience which presents a real life problem and how it was successfully resolved. Then the chapter presents "The Model" which refreshes the reader on that portion of the Scrum method and then Mitch provides a "Keys To Success" section next which highlights his key points of how to success in each area presented. Each chapter ends with a "Works Cited" which provides additional reference material which I also thought was very valuable.If your organization is adopting Scrum then this book is a must read for everyone involved in the process including the leadership at your organization. I highly recommend it!

This book has been very useful to help me in my first couple years in Agile. As a trainer and user of Agile, Mitch has a ton of experience with various companies, teams, challenging situations which he shares in the book and makes for an interesting read. The book is really well organized and laid out with real examples, clear explanations, tools, and good tips and advice for how to navigate running an Agile project. What I really found useful is that the chapters are organized in topics so you can look up an area where you are struggling and read that chapter to get help. You don't have to read the book cover-to-cover before you glean useful knowledge. However, I think at this point I have probably read the entire book just in my own studying and learning. Recommended.

A great book that focuses on the "how" but sometimes ignoring the "why". The reason I give it 4 and not 5 stars is because I often found myself wanting to skip pages explaining how to do things like velocity estimation, something I disagree deserved such focus.Update: I actually came back to give this a 5 stars instead of 4 stars because of how well it explains the topics. I may not agree with the why on some of the topics, but the what are all very very useful.

This is an excellent guide to using SCRUM in the real world. It's one thing to be able to pass the PSM or CSM but dealing with challenging situations on the job is quite another. The case studies gave me eeal insight into how to really apply SCRUM effectively. The book is laid out so you can dip in and out or read it cover to cover.

Great book with real examples, just not academic. It focus on real experience and how to deal problems and how to resolve them.

... for scrum masters, product owners, developers and last but not least, business leaders and classical project managers who want to understand what scrum and agility means for daily business. Most concepts are illustrated with stories.

The book is very good however the book has some pages not properly cut and with some pages folded, the 3 start is because on that otherwise would be 4 or 5.