The long way round…

Okay, I finished Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber. Damned fine book that I highly recommend. The neat thing about this book is that is it defines Scrum, start to finish within a single chapter, that being chapter 1. The remaining chapters demonstrate exactly what Scrum is with real life examples of projects applying Scrum: the good, the bad and the ugly. Ken pull this off nicely.

I am still coming down on the side of Scrum with a bit of XP, as opposed to XP with a bit of Scrum. The simplicity of Scrum, its clear and concise rules and practices, fit with the way I tend to run projects. I don’t know enough of about XP in practice, so I’ve decided to attend XPDay this November. Also, we just had the pleasure of Rachel Davies, the now chair of Software Practice Advancement 2007 (formerly OT) come out to our offices to run a number of XP sessions. Interesting stuff…

This was a strange book.  I simply never got into it.  If you are new to Agile and/or having problems selling Agile into your organisation then its worth a look.  It has a lot of evidence for why Iterative and Incremental Development (IID) works.   Also, if you want a reference to how different agile methods such as XP, SCRUM, Evo, and the Unified Process (UP) compare/integrate with one another then maybe worth a look.  It’s strange, it was a book I didn’t learnt anything new from but it had tons of information and/or content in.  I dunno, maybe its because I was on a course given my Craig Larman (I learnt tons there) last week and everything was a bit too fresh…