Books on Scrum and Agile Project Management
If Scrum provides the project management framework used in a majority of Agile projects, eXtreme Programming (XP) is the main source of technical practices for Agile software development. This book written by Alan Shalloway, Scott Bain, Ken Pugh and Amir Kolsky is focused on these technical aspects. The first part deal with the coding and testing activities, and the second part discusses how to handle the software design activity with an Agile perspective.
As Agile and Scrum are adopted by an increasing number of companies, “Thinking Tools for Large-Scale Scrum” from Craig Larman and Bas Vodde provides important thinking tools to remind us that it is more important to “be agile” than to “do agile”. Scrum or Lean are frameworks that we can use for continuous improvement of our software development process and not tools that should be applied blindly like cooking recipes.
This book is a little bit different in the project management category. Its goal is to present an open framework and not a prescriptive model. Many project managers prefer to apply existing recipes for their project, but if you are ready to step out of your comfort zone, you will find in this books many ingredients to create your own recipe to manage software development projects.
This book is composed of papers previously written by Watts Humphrey. The people and management aspects of software development are often neglected in books and this one is a good source to start thinking about them… and improving our practice.