Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process

A Mike Cohn Signature Book

by Kenneth S. Rubin

A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process The Single-Source, Comprehensive Guide to Scrum for All Team Members, Managers, and Executives If you want to use Scrum to develop innovative products and services that delight your customers, Essential Scrum is the complete, single-source reference you’ve been searching for. Leading Scrum coach and trainer Kenny Rubin illuminates the values, principles, and practices of Scrum, and describes flexible, proven approaches that can help you implement it far more effectively. Whether you are new to Scrum or years into your use, this book will introduce, clarify, and deepen your Scrum knowledge at the team, product, and portfolio levels. Drawing from Rubin’s experience helping hundreds of organizations succeed with Scrum, this book provides easy-to-digest descriptions enhanced by more than two hundred illustrations based on an entirely new visual icon language for describing Scrum’s roles, artifacts, and activities. Essential Scrum will provide every team member, manager, and executive with a common understanding of Scrum, a shared vocabulary they can use in applying it, and practical knowledge for deriving maximum value from it.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Programming, Management, Technology, Computer Science, Software

496 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2012

About the author

Ken Rubin is Managing Principal at Innolution, a company that provides Scrum and agile training and coaching to help companies develop products in an effective and economically sensible way. A Certified Scrum Trainer, Ken has trained over 20,000 people on agile and Scrum, Kanban, Smalltalk development, managing object-oriented projects, and transition management. He has coached over 200 companies, ranging from start-ups to Fortune 10.

Ken was the first managing director of the worldwide Scrum Alliance, a nonprofit organization focused on the successful adoption of Scrum. He is the author of the Amazon #1 best-selling book Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process.

Reviews

[Saran Sivashanmugam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a Certified Scrum Master (CSM), but I learned 200% about Scrum after reading this book. I'm a people manager and this book gave valuable insights about approaching scrum from a people leadership perspective. I really liked Kenneth's writing style providing many real-world examples. After reading this book, I realized the importance of having Sprint Review and Sprint Planning meetings. This book made me realized that Scrum is not just about daily stand-ups and sticky notes. I highly recommend this book to all Scrum team members including developers, scrum masters, people managers and importantly product owners. The best part of the book is the illustrations with figures making easy to digest the concepts. I wish the illustrations are in multi-color similar to what they have on their website. This book is going to be on my work desk library.

[Ben Linders · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about getting more out of Scrum, an intro to Scrum and its values, principles and practices, and a source of inspiration on how to apply it. This practical Scrum guide can help you how to plan and execute projects with Scrum, and on interfacing parts of the organization that use Agile with parts that don't, which is crucial to assure successful Agile software development.

For a detailed review of this book, and an interview with the author Ken Rubin, see http://www.infoq.com/articles/essenti...

[Christophe Addinquy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, it's more than the "essentials". While it covers the basis, it also cover the "admitted practices" and even more. The content of the book is really strong and the author have a proven mastery in each of then.
However, the way Scrum is covered here makes it a "Shu level" or "Ha level", while Scrum by essence is "Ri level", an unfortunate way to misdirect the practitioner. But you are well aware of it: have fun, it's a great content !
Ma note de lecture en français ici

[Georgi Mirchev · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is an interesting but way too filled with unnecessary content. I mean that the author uses so much words to describe something so simple that I feel like he does it just to fill the pages. That's why it took me so much team to go through it all. Other than that, it has some great practical examples, a lot of images describing the whole idea behind Scrum and Agile. I liked it, but it could be way shorter.

[Mitchell Friedman · Rating 3 out of 5]

An okay book on scrum. But it felt long. And in the end reading it was a slog. It isn't really a reference book, but I'm guessing it will work as a reference book. And that's probably it's problem - it just doesn't read well as a book. My guess is that if you just want to explain to someone the responsibilities of a Product Owner or Scrum Master it will work just fine. Or most any other detail. So useful if not enjoyable. 3.5 of 5.

[Saeed · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this book along migrating to scrum on the business and can not say how much it helped me get there. There are not much difference about order of the chapters and every time I read a chapter, according to my experience found new things to learn.
If you plan to migrate to scrum, try the last chapter first ;)

[Alex ♈ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gut geschrieben, nützliche Praxisbeispiele, vor allem Kapitel über Managers.

[Vera · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've only read the chapters that our book club selected as Essential but they were all really good, it enhanced my understanding of Agile as a methodology and showed that it's not one-size-fits-all.
I will definitely go back to this book if I ever end up working on a Scrum project.

[Mik Chernomordikov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great one-stop-shop book on Scrum, how to adopt and keep improving your software development processes through it!

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

It bothers me when a book uses biased examples and straw-man storytelling to promote their view, but at least the stories are useful to people trying to understand what scrum "looks like". Overall, a straightforward and non-dogmatic explanation of scrum and agile methods in general, once you get past the snide commentary about "waterfall" design methods. Lay off it already; beating a dead horse is just self-gratification and it might alienate proponents of the waterfall method (are there any out there?) that could otherwise be brought around.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I expected an excellent framework for agile product development (and got it), yet this book goes farther... it provides methods/attributes of leadership that are critical to Scrum success, are highly productive and leverage knowledge of the development team. It's great for managers and anyone with vested interest in getting results from highly creative teams.

[Angie Malaier · Rating 5 out of 5]

To paraphrase the good reverend from COMING TO AMERICA, "If lovin' software development is wrong....I don't wanna be right."

The author has written a truly easy to read and interesting text on Scrum. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to learn this style of iterative development. I'll be using this as a go to reference for a long time to come. Thanks and kudos, Mr. Rubin!

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I give this book high marks because it is indeed a good guide to Scrum. That being said, I would say it's pretty text bookish, so I started to skim it about 1/3 of the way through, rather than read word for word. Still good info, since the company I just started working for uses Scrum principles for software development. I'll definitely go back to it if I need to utilize the processes in my role.

[Lars De Richter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great introduction to using Scrum in all types of organisations. Everything is explained in great detail And the diagrams serve as à great summary. I will certainly turn back to thuis book as a reference.

[Ed van der Winden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very readable and comprehensive work on agile and scrum in particular. Excellent reference material.

[Dariusz · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best and essentian of scrum

[Dan Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a software engineer, I've experienced a number of ways to organize work and get things done as a team and organization. My current large team is splitting into many smaller teams, so it feels like a good time to learn some best practices and spread them throughout our new teams.

This well-organized book delivers on its promise, which is to define the essentials of the Scrum software process: what to do, who does it, and how. As you can perhaps imagine, a lot of toner has been spilled on agile software development and it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I picked this book up based on a reviewer who reported that many teams throughout a software organization at Amazon had converged on this presentation. I am pleased to confirm that it does the trick. The book is written at the right level of abstraction and detail, for a very even take on the moving parts of Scrum. At the level it chooses, it is a comprehensive look at the entire lifecycle. It's suitable for all stakeholders, including engineers, managers, customers, and executives.

Who needs Scrum? It's not just for software. It's a work lifecycle suitable for any kind of work that is exploratory in nature, where part of the direction is to find the right direction, and part of the expectation is that we will want to routinely modify our direction based on information that we discover from our work or market.

So for calcified disciplines or pursuits, where progress and process are predictable, it's not a good fit. In software, we find the exact opposites: the possibility to have an idea and make it concrete within the day, the perpetual reinvention of services and products, and the opportunity not to reinvent the wheel, by standing on the shoulders of all the software we can license. So we need a process that will help us expect, embrace, and manage change.

In Scrum, in brief, cross functional teams self organize to complete work. A product owner, such as a business or customer representative, helps the team to prioritize that work to deliver the highest value first. A ScrumMaster coaches the team through the continuously improving process and removes impediments to work. Work happens in small batches called sprints, which are envisioned, planned, and executed just in time, then reviewed with the team, customers, and stakeholders each sprint. Scrum intends to minimize the creation of up front planning artifacts and unfinished work in progress. Scrum favors learning quickly and changing direction over executing plans that were made at the time of maximum ignorance.

Beyond these core practices, the book highlights that each organization's practical application of these principles will differ, but offers some practical advice nonetheless. I especially appreciate the sections on how the scrum roles relate to traditional managerial roles, and on common pitfalls or worst practices to avoid.

The book also provides visual aids for many of its concepts, giving the book an overall consistency in presentation of lifecycle stages, actors, and work. The only place I found it mildly confusing was that all task backlogs look roughly the same, whether they're at the grain of years or hours. Some are governed by the definition of concept, ready to plan, others by the definition of done. But they are all flattened to the same icons. Maybe I would have preferred to see the ideas ripening, sharpening, or expanding as they became more concrete. A small quibble.

I may buy this book again to give to the leaders and engineers at my job. I'm thinking about creating training material based on its concepts. Of course, it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff in the agile methodology training course world too.

In any case, if you are thinking about converging on a software process, or just looking for a mental framework to understand it from top to bottom, I join that other reviewer with a hearty recommendation. This could be the one.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Note: I gave up around 100 pages in because I got bored. I wasn't a fan of scrum going into this, and the book didn't change my mind. From what I read, and from skimming the table of contents, this seems like a comprehensive and well-organised explanation of scrum and its components. The book itself is good, so I can't mark it down too much because I don't like scrum.

However, this book reinforced my belief that scrum is designed to appeal to corporate execs and managers more than software engineers. Scrum is an attempt to compromise between agile and traditional command & control management. There seems to be an undertone of contempt for developers, and a desire to hold them accountable (i.e. to punish them when things don't go to plan).

There are a few key things that I find questionable about scrum. One is the notion that commitment (that is, committing to delivering a certain set of features in the next sprint) builds trust between the developers and the product owner. The problem with this idea is that both the product owner and the developers know that estimates are very unreliable, even for the next week or two. Therefore, by committing to their estimates, the developers are saying to the product owner either "we think you are stupid enough to believe our estimates" or "we are going to pad this work out to fill the whole sprint" or "we are going to skimp on quality to get all this work done". None of these options builds trust.

Either way, nothing happens if the developers don't meet their commitment, so the only point seems to be to put psychological pressure on them. This problem doesn't go away by using story points either, because story points are still used to decide what work will be done in a sprint. I think that if estimates really are necessary for the business, the best we can do is rough estimates with rough confidence levels (e.g. something like "50% sure it will be done within a week; 80% sure it will be done within 2 weeks").

Although ostensibly a selling point, scrum's broad applicability and corresponding lack of information about software engineering practices is its greatest weakness for me. The practices of scrum are pretty much useless if you're software is a slow, unworkable big ball of mud. And if your software is well-designed, easy to deploy and a pleasure to work with, you can do a lot better than scrum.

Extreme Programming, on the other hand, takes software engineering more seriously in recommending pair programming and test-driven development. Taking it even further, continuous delivery just seems to make scrum obsolete. Why have week long sprints, with big planning, review, and retrospective meetings, when you can just develop and deploy a feature in a few hours, get feedback as required, and iterate?

The framework also puts all the responsibility for process improvement on the scrum team. But in the teams I've worked in, the major bottlenecks of the software development process are outside of the responsibility of any individual team. So scrum seems to put responsibility for improvement on those with no authority to put in place whole-process improvements. Scrum of scrums and release trains don't seem to be satisfactory solutions to this.

Most of the practices described in this book are more or less justified, and I can see why they would be useful in some specific contexts, but I think it would be a miscalculation to apply the scrum framework to any context. You can't become agile with an off-the-shelf framework.

The most useful part of this book to me is chapter 3, which is a very good explanation and justification of agile against waterfall, which fortunately doesn't mention scrum very much.

[Felipe Cañas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had been warned that this book was very "hand-wavy", which I understood as it making many assertions without solid proof. In a way this is true, as human processes are always notably difficult to quantify and measure, at least in my experience.

However, the book does do a good job of explaining the agile framework that is Scrum. The author uses anecdotal experience to compare traditional waterfall-style development processes with it, and why Scrum comes out on top. The arguments are not based on any solid data, but my personal anecdotal experience made me arrive at the same conclusions as the author. In this case, I suppose it's good enough.

The book goes from outlining the high-level ideas behind Scrum, and then goes into more specific situations. This is useful for going from very abstract guidelines to getting some hints as to how to apply Scrum in common situations. As such, after reading through it, it becomes a useful reference book for "process best practices".

To wrap up, I see how this book could be labelled as "hand-wavy", however I would not say this makes the book useless. Far from it.

[Mattheus Guttenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent introduction and a thorough overview of Scrum, the most popular Agile approach to software and product development. Like other Agile approaches, Scrum has you (and your team) work in short 2 or 3 week "sprints" gathering immediate feedback and adapting development efforts quickly rather than working from detailed, predictive, up-front project plans. Rubin does a great job explaining every role, describing every process, and articulating every little nuance that goes along with operating in an incremental and iterative Scrum framework. This (and other Agile approaches) is already a normal business practice for highly successful development teams and will continue to be adopted as it proves its flexibility, economy, productivity, and all-around superiority to the traditional Gantt-driven, Waterfall-style methodology. Recommended for project managers and anyone involved in product development.

[Lilo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book, I use is as my textbook for the “Introduction to Agile: Scrum” course I teach. It is extremely well written, and supplemented with easy to understand examples. The chapters on planning are essential and often missed in many Agile books. At times, it does appear to have much unneeded content – and a reader should have an understanding in general Agile before reading it. I have my students reading the first couple of chapters, as well as the chapters on planning and executing. There are other sources with more brief and digestible explanations of certain chapters, such as the three on the Scrum roles. Overall, I highly recommend this text to a student of Scrum, Scrum Master, Product Owner, or someone working on a Scrum team. For someone looking for an overview of Agile or for an executive that wants a high-level review, should look for other texts.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book to understand how Scrum works and to get concrete example of how one can implement an Agile process. It didn't disappoint. The book covers each concept, step by step, in a logical order so every idea builds from those that came before it. One of the best parts is that or covers general business practices that are often absent from the modern workplace:

- How to account for the costs and benefits that determine if a project should be abandoned
- Consequences of technical debt
- The importance of accountability and people skills
- People should be evaluated based on their impact to the team rather than how they contribute individually (!!!)

I would recommend this book to anyone who's curious about Scrum, Agile, or generally wants their projects to run more smoothly.

[Navila Uddin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This became a top choice to read in a book club format with my team. We wanted to be better aligned with scrum best practices.

It is an excellent reference book - it introduces helpful concepts and diagrams that gave us the ability to reflect on our team's agile process. Some of these insights were communicated upstream to the leads and they are driving change to the agile process (Example: how we review sprints company wide)

The thing about reference books is that if someone were to ask me what I really enjoyed about the book, I would not be able to say. There was no sticky element like a story, to associate my learnings to. However my scrum vocabulary has developed as a result of this book.

[Nguyen Huu Anh Vu · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book explores and explains in detail the essential parts of Scrum:
- Agile principles: 3 pillars (Inspection, Adaptation and Transparency), Less up-front more just-in-time, focus on idle work rather than idle worker, fast feedback workflow
- Roles and their Responsibilities: Product Owner, Scrum Master, Developer and Manager (not an official Scrum role, but important in many organizations)
- Artifacts and Processes: Product Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint planning, burndown chart, documentation... all the gears that make Scrum Scrum.

After reading the book, I understand more about Scrum. Why do we need Scrum? and How does it make software development fast?

[Fabiano Cerqueira · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book really surprised me. It delivers more than "the essentials" it advertises. The chapters are well organized and cover every aspect of the Scrum process with clarity and objectiveness. The language is fluid, and besides its 400+ pages, it's never a boring reading. The whole Scrum process is described with practical examples, which gets you right into the day-by-day routine of an agile team.
The book is aimed at people who are starting or planning to start with Scrum, but it also adds value to those professionals that already have some experience in the subject.

[Plesz Roland · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really good book which leads you to the essential parts of scrum (haha).

Being more serious the best thing in the book is that it is really understandable. As agile (and scrum) is made on logic and using plain English to describe complex solutions too, this book also does the same: it is not full of professional not-understandable words and expressions but still manages to explain everything. I recommend it to everyone who wants to understand scrum and agile in general - I myself had some experience and wanted to organize the knowledge. For this, it is perfect.

[Uriel Vidal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es una referencia para aquellos que empezamos en scrum, sus ejemplos son sencillos y a pesar de que como el mismo autor dice: es mejor aprendiendo scrum practicando que con los libros, sin embargo saber el porqué de las herramientas que usa y como es que funciona le mejora continua, ademas de que explica muy bien en donde y donde no aplicar scrum, nos da una sensación de tranquilidad a la hora de aplicar scrum.

Definitivamente un libro de cabecera para el uso de scrum.

[Abhi Yerra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Did I read a whole book on running Scrum? Yes, yes I did. This book has a lot of in-depth coverage of Scrum and how to apply it. I honestly feel like it is a book every person at every company I worked at read as Scrum and Agile planning have largely transformed into this big thing with lots of rules like waterfall with Manager fiefdoms. In essence Scrum is simple with few rules and can be adapted to each team.

[Gene Ishchuk · Rating 5 out of 5]

I quite liked it.
It is way above the book written by Sutherland re scrum - can't compare the quality of content.
It is very useful as well, some things were going wrong for me and as a newbie I didn't quite get the cause.
This book puts scrum and my job as PO into perspective, it is twice as good if you are currently a PO or a Scrum Master, it expands the horizons of things that may (and eventually will) go havoc.

Bananas, I will order a paper version for myself!

Thanks, Ken

[Manuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential Scrum was my companion book while I was studying to present the PSM I exam, around July 2017. I was new to the Scrum Framework and the book give me a great insight to the most used methodology in the Agile world; a great support to the Scrum Guide.

Highly recommended for beginners, it provide the basic knowledge with mastery content, excellent graphic that enhance your understanding of the framework.