Essential Scrum

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 Scrumis 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 Scrumwill 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.

Agile coaches, you're gonna be happy with this book. Kenny Rubin has created an indispensable resource for us. Do you have a manager that just doesn't 'get it'? Hand them this book and ask them to flip to Chapter 3 for a complete explanation of how Scrum is less risky than plan-driven management. It's written just for them-in management-speak. Want to help the team come to a common understanding of Scrum? The visual icon language used throughout this book will help you help them. These are just two ways this book can aid you to coach Scrum teams. Use it well. - Lyssa Adkins, Coach of Agile Coaches, Agile Coaching Institute, author, Coaching Agile Teams.

One of the best, most comprehensive descriptions of the core Scrum framework out there! Essential Scrum is for anyone-new to or experienced with Scrum-who's interested in the most important aspects of the process. Kenny does an excellent job of distilling the key tenets of the Scrum framework into a simple format with compelling visuals. As a Scrum coach for many teams, I continually reference the material for new ways to help teams that are learning and practicing the framework. I've seen Scrum continually misinterpreted and poorly implemented by big companies and tool vendors for more than ten years. Reading this book will help you get back to the basics and focus on what's important. - Joe Balistrieri, Process Development Manager, Rockwell Automation.

Corporate IT leadership, which has been slow to embrace agile methods, would benefit immensely from giving a copy of this book to all of their project and delivery managers. Kenny Rubin has laid out in this book all the pragmatic business case and process materials needed for any corporate IT shop to successfully implement Scrum. - John F. Bauer III, veteran of technical solution delivery in large corporate IT shops

Kenny's extensive experience as a consultant, trainer and past managing director of the Scrum Alliance is evident in this book. Along with providing the basics and introduction to Scrum, this book addresses the questions of masses-what happens to project managers? Essential Scrum helps us understand the big picture and guides how organization leaders can support and be involved with their Scrum teams for successful agile transformations. - Sameer S. Bendre CSM, PMP, Senior Consultant, 3i Infotech Inc.

If you're new to agile development or to Scrum, this book will give you a flying start. The examples and descriptions are clear and vivid and you'll often find yourself asking a question just before the book addresses that very topic. - Johannes Brodwall, Principal Solution Architect, Steria Norway

Kenny's well-structured explanations have a clarity to them that echoes the sensibilities of Smalltalkthe development environment with which he worked for years and from which both Scrum and Extreme Programming were born. This book pulls together a thorough set of agile management principles that really hit the mark and will no doubt guide you toward a more effective agile approach. - Rowan Bunning, Founder, Scrum with style

There are lots of books on Scrum these days, but this book takes a new angle, a reality check for software practitioners. Kenny uses real-world examples and clear illustrations to show what makes a solid foundation for successful agile development. Readers will understand the value of building quality in and the reality that we can't get everything right up front, we must work incrementally and learn as we go. It might have Scrum' in the title, but the book leverages effective practices from the larger agile universe to help managers and their teams succeed. - Lisa Crispin, coauthor, Agile Testing

Kenny Rubin managed to write the book that I want everyone associated with Scrum

About the Author

Kenneth S. RubinAprovides Scrum and Agile training and coaching to help companies develop products more effectively and economically. A Certified Scrum Trainer, he has trained more than eighteen thousand people on Agile and Scrum, Smalltalk development, managing object-oriented projects and transition management. He has coached hundreds of companies, ranging from startups to the Fortune 10. Rubin was the first Managing Director of the worldwide Scrum Alliance, a nonprofit organization focused on successful Scrum adoption. His diverse development roles have included successful stints as Scrum product owner, ScrumMaster and developer. Rubin's executive management roles have included CEO, COO, VP of Engineering, VP of Product Management and VP of Professional Services. He is the author ofSucceeding with Objects(Addison - Wesley, 1995)