Customer Reviews

A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum

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If you have no Agile background, then this book covers some of the basics. If you are a actually after information on Agile in large Distributed and complex integrated environments (as claimed by the authors) then you will be very much disappointed. However, you will learn that you need to be aware that other countries are in fact in different time zones - this seems to be a key issue for IBM (the author) as the time zone issue is repeated ad nauseam throughout this book. In fact many of the key points (which are mostly around telephone conferencing issues to India) are repeated over and over.

There are a lot of books about agile software development. There are a lot of books about scrum. Most of them are pretty general. Of course, they have examples and case studies. What I like about this book is that it is a real reflection of how things are done at IBM. Whether you like IBM or not, you have a chance to peek inside the big blue box and see how they make things tick. I really, really appreciate that chance, so I applaud the work of the authors, who have not only collaborated to write the book but also invited their colleagues at IBM to contribute. I was also impressed by their decision to donate all royalties to charity. Well done!

In less than 200-pages, the authors present experienced-based guidance for Distributed Scrum. They do a great job: Their points are clear, practical and proven. There's a wealth of re-usable information that's easily accessible.

This is a valuable tool for those new to Scrum as well as for those with several years of Scrum, distributed or not. The points made and the examples shared serve as excellent reminders for the experienced and as key insights and tips for those new to Scrum.

If you're a Scrum Master, you need to read this book whether you're using Distributed Scrum or not.

The book gives an good explantion about how a distributed scrum works which can be uncerstood by anyone. The book is more than its worth.

I work with organizations around the world helping them to scale agile strategies to meet their real-world needs. Although this book is focused on providing strategies for dealing with geographical distribution, it also covers many of the issues that you'll run into with large teams, complex problem domains and complex technical domains. An important aspect of scaling agile techniques is to first recognize that's there's more to scalability than dealing with large teams, something which this book clearly demonstrates.

At the risk of sounding a bit corny, I've eagerly awaited the publication of this book for some time. I've known two of the authors, Elizabeth and Matt, for several years and have had the pleasure of working with them and learning from them as a result. Along with hundreds of other IBMers I watched this book get written and provided input where I could. The reason why I'm so excited about it is that I've wanted something that I could refer the customers to that I work with and honestly say, "yes, we know that this works because this is what we do in practice".

IBM is doing some very interesting work when it comes to scaling agile. We haven't published enough externally, in my opinion, due to a preference for actively sharing our experiences internally. This book collects many of our experiences into a coherent whole and more importantly shares them outside the IBM process ecosystem. Bottom line is that I think that you'll get a lot out of this book.