The Enterprise and Scrum (Paperback)

by Ken Schwaber (Author)
Key Phrases: daily scrums, rollout teams, simulation layer, Product Backlog, Product Owner, Woodgrove Bank (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Get the practical guidance you need to apply Scrum enterprise wide--straight from a leader and innovator in the agile process movement. Agile development methods, such as Scrum, have been shown to produce improvements in speed, quality, and cost. However, the practices within Scrum, such as self-managing teams, are often so different from the norm at most enterprises and cause an organizational reaction. The productivity and quality benefits of Scrum pose a compelling reason to make such changes--moving it from the small team to the enterprise level. And as Scrum crosses to the mainstream, executives need to know how to manage the necessary change processes. In addition, managers and employees alike want to know what the change means to them, personally. With case studies and pragmatic approaches, this book shows development managers and developers how to extend Scrum from one or two projects within an engineering organization to the larger enterprise. It also addresses the questions that newcomers have regarding process, interaction, reports, habits, tradeoffs, and more.

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

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press (June 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735623376
• ISBN-13: 978-0735623378
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #157,499 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 57 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

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

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent resource for any large group adopting Scrum, June 28, 2007

By	Michael Cohn "agile developer" (Lafayette, CO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The two best things about this book are that it: (1) provides a framework for adopting Scrum across an enterprise, and (2) describes some techniques for surmounting some of the problems you will likely face as you try. Although the book is about the "enterprise and Scrum" most of the contents will be applicable to any group of teams transitioning to Scrum. A set of five teams working together on a single project would benefit from this book even if they are not the whole enterprise.

Too many agile books suffer from being targeted at a single team working on a deserted island--that is, a seven-person team with no issues outside their one team. This book does not suffer from that problem. Want to know how to organize work on a project that is partitioned by architectural layer? How to structure a product backlog for the entire organization? Or how to organize teams across a large project? Or what are the proper reporting relationships on a large Scrum project? This book provides sage advice on these enterprise adoption issues and more.

The book is chock-full of real-life anecdotes (in which only the name of the company and key players have been changed). Each anecdote illustrates how one real company dealt with a real problem. Their problem, their context, and their solution won't exactly be yours, but seeing how others have addressed challenges can be illuminating in thinking how to address yours.

This is probably not your best choice as a first book on Scrum. For that start with the author's other two books. This book picks up where they left off, providing a wealth of information for enterprises and even workgroups adopting Scrum. If you're already familiar with the basics of Scrum, and especially if you are starting to hit the hard points of adopting it and spreading it through your organization then this book is for you.

7 of 8 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 (Midwest USA) - See all my reviews

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.