Carl Joseph's profile

Full of really practical and fun advice, July 1, 2008

This is one of those "common sense" books. It's full of really obvious practical advice. The difference I found however is in the multitude of simple and practical exercises it contains.

The book is a really quick and easy read. It's now constantly on my desk as a reference. I plan to use a few of the exercises in our next retrospective in a week.

Whilst this is an agile/scrum focused book, many of the exercises could be easily adapted to other "review" type situations in business and teaching.

Good but not great, June 23, 2008

This is a good book with lots of valuable information around the empirical nature of Scrum. For someone who was central to creating Scrum, the book doesn't offer much more.

It's broken up into three parts: Overview of Scrum / Why it works / Case studies.

The overview of Scrum is poor at best. There are much simpler ways to communicate it. If you don't know anything about Scrum then this book probably won't help get you started.

The "Why it works" chapters were much more interesting and valuable. It takes you through the epirical nature of scrum and why previous methodologies have failed. The most interesting part is the brief exposition around the… Read more

Good book, somewhat interesting but poorly written, June 20, 2008

This book certainly introduces some central concepts which I found illuminating and useful. There are quite a few exercises ("time-ins") which everyone should do at some point in their life, if not regularily. I found some of these to be better than others whilst a few appeared to be there just for the sake of filling up space.

The writing itself is a little self-helpy which is something I couldn't quite get over. I would've liked to have more hard data and information to challenge me in my thinking around the topic. Much of the book is also repetative and I felt it was at times patronising.

It took a bit of concentration to get over the writing but once I focused… Read more