Agile Scrum: Improving Practices for Business Gains is written with a “difference” that readers shall experience while reading it. This “difference” is mainly the focus on gaining the operational excellence in software development for achieving business value.
Following are the main differentiating areas:
- All practices are focused to make them effective in operations by explicitly specified “operational guidelines”.
- Different challenges and anti-patterns are documented for being aware of them, so that the practitioners can be well prepared to handle them.
- Some roles which are not explicitly specified by the framework are extensively elaborated in the book to avoid myths. For example, Role of a Project Manager, Leadership and stakeholders.
- A very rare and unique thing is that all the roles are covered with their objectives, role-based responsibilities, skills needed to perform the roles effectively and challenges associated with these roles.
- Sprint planning procedures are elaborated extensively.
- Unique “pattern of activities” is specified for capacity-based control during sprint execution.
- How to conduct effective grooming session with elaborated contents based on “Shu Ha Ri” concept is discussed in details is difficult to find.
- Mapping user stories with feature grooming makes requirements analysis in scrum very effective, and this is the distinctive feature of this book.
- User story templates are specified as standard as well as elaborated, which is team-based “Shu Ha Ri” tweaking.
- Measurements and metrics that cover all about sprint performance, product quality, agile principles and happiness index and success of scrum deployment is very special in the book.
- A lot of learning for everyone comes from handling Project Management, Quality Management, Risk Management, Customer Management and Cost Management using scrum practices is very distinct.
- Case studies take readers to different virtual environments, which help in understanding the challenges and search for the solutions which might be compatible to their own environments.
Achieving business gains cannot happen if there is no effectiveness in scrum deployment. Readers shall definitely learn this from the book.