The Enterprise and Scrum [Paperback]

Ken Schwaber (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0735623376 | ISBN-13: 978-0735623378 | Publication Date: June 13, 2007 | Edition: 1

It’s time to extend the benefits of Scrum—greater agility, higher-quality products, and lower costs—from individual teams to your entire enterprise. However, with Scrum’s lack of prescribed rules, the friction of change can be challenging as people struggle to break from old project management habits. In this book, agile-process revolution leader Ken Schwaber takes you through change management—for your organizational and interpersonal processes—explaining how to successfully adopt Scrum across your entire organization.

A cofounder of Scrum, Ken draws from decades of experience, answering your questions through case studies of proven practices and processes. With them, you’ll learn how to adopt—and adapt—Scrum in the enterprise. And gain profound levels of transparency into your development processes.

Discover how to:

• Evaluate the benefits of adopting Scrum in any size organization
• Initiate an enterprise transition project
• Implement a single, prioritized Product Backlog
• Organize effective Scrum teams using a top-down approach
• Adapt and apply solutions for integrating engineering practices across multiple teams
• Shorten release times by managing high-value increments
• Refine your Scrum practices and help reduce the length of Sprints

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Key Book Benefits:

-Delivers best practices from an author with more than 20 years of experience with agile development methods

-Provides guidance about both system and interpersonal processes

-Features numerous case studies about Scrum adoption at large enterprises--including Microsoft® Corporation

About the Author

Ken Schwaber is an experienced software developer, product manager, and industry consultant. He is one of the leaders of the agile process revolution, a signatory of the Agile Manifesto, founder and director of the Agile Alliance, founder of the Scrum Alliance, and one of the developers of the Scrum agile process. Over the last four years, he has had a hand in training more than 4,000 certified ScrumMasters (Scrum change agents and project managers).

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press; 1 edition (June 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735623376
• ISBN-13: 978-0735623378
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #425,447 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ken Schwaber is president of Advanced Development 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 versions of the Scrum development process.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

64 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars don't waste your time, July 14, 2007

By 

a reader "a reader" (United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Enterprise and Scrum (Paperback)

I read this book based on Mike Cohn's recommendation. However, I was extremely disappointed in it.

The book starts out telling you what to do to manage Scrum throughout an enterprise. The only problem is the approach given assumes the entire enterprise has embraced using Scrum. I have never seen this. The real problem is typically getting the enterprise to embrace Scrum. The book gives little insight in how to do this. Integrating processes across teams and how to get organizations that work in competition with each other now to cooperate is pretty much ignored.

The rest of the book poses problems and tells you what you need to do, but rarely tells you how to do it. Most often, we are simply told to let the team figure it out. Sort of like a financial analyst telling you - "what you have to do is figure out how to buy stocks when they are low, and then sell them when the stocks go higher." Uh, OK, but _how_ do I do that? The book doesn't quite ever tell us.

The book also tells us about how the core of a system can become dead and tells us we have to stop this. But how? No advice is given on how to write tests or quality code or how to do integration across an Enterprise. In fact, almost nothing about writing code exists in the book. It's as if by following process entirely we can solve all of our problems with code quality, tests, integration, etc ...

My experience with Scrum teams and management is that you must give them reasons to expand Scrum beyond the team or you must explain to them how Scrum can scale when technical problems exist. How do you manage designs across multiple teams? How do you ensure re-use of common modules? How do you manage the dependencies between teams? These are all good questions which go both unasked and unanswered.

I'll admit that I didn't finish the book. After reading about 2/3rds through it I skimmed the rest because it didn't look like any value was coming forward from it.

Two books that I find much more useful are Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises by Dean Leffingwell and Agile Software Development in the Large: Diving Into the Deep by Jutta Eckstein

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The book is more like an informal set of lecture notes written for a presentation, July 27, 2008

By 

Qiulang (Beijing, China) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Enterprise and Scrum (Paperback)

I built up a lot of expectation before reading this book because I learned a lot from the author's earlier book "Agile Project Management With Scrum" and not to mention that the author was the cofounder of scrum. But after I read it I was rather disappointed. I feel like the book is more like an informal set of lecture notes written for a presentation in stead of a well written and well thought book.

Before I further comment about that let me first take a guess about why people want to read a technical book. I think most people want to read a technical book because they hope the book can teach them something new. And if the reading process makes readers entertained that will make the book even more valuable. And that was what I got from "Agile Project Management With Scrum". But technical reading mostly does not get that luxury so long as the book is informative (and enlightened) we will say the time and energy spent for it is well worth.

So back to this book, I think before reading it every one will know that running scrum in a traditional waterfall process company is hard. What we want to know is how hard that it is. What kind of (typical) situation we may run into; what kind of specific issue we need to address and what was the author's way or suggestion to tackle them. But the author just kept saying that it is hard but you got to stick with scrum then finally you will make it. The author kept repeating that without even giving a valuable suggestion for it (putting the obstacles into transition backlog can't really be counted as a valuable suggestion). And the examples he gave were also superficial, i.e. repeating that you will make it finally without giving any valuable suggestion about how.

The second part of the book is about the practice using in the enterprise. But except for suggesting the use of scrum of scrum, which again readers will anticipate before reading the book and checking your burn down chart to know your productivity I still do not see any thing new or enlightened, although the example the author gave here were a little bit more impressive than the examples gave in the first part.

The third part of the book was the worst. The third part is about the introduction of scrum, the kind of materials you can find all over the internet. I even found that the author copies pasted some of paragraphs in his previous book "Agile Project Management With Scrum".

I do not mean to be harsh and the author is really some person I look up to. So maybe he was talking about something totally beyond my level and I hope anyone can point that out for me.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The next step in Scrum applications..., November 29, 2007

By 

Matthew D Edwards (Global Nomad) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Enterprise and Scrum (Paperback)

An add-on to the existing two SCRUM books by Schwaber. This book discusses how to evolve an enterprise collectively rather than just parts of it at a time. You'll likely have no context for this book unless having first read the others. Note: this book is, like the others, descriptive in nature and definitively not prescriptive. So if you're looking for someone to tell you exactly `how' to do something, this isn't it.