<pre>
Author/s : Ken Schwaber,Mike Beedle
Publisher : Prentice Hall
Category : Other
Review by : Frank Carver
Rating : 6 horseshoes</pre>
This book is a strange mixture of trendy agile methodology and dusty corporate management. My guess is that it has been hurriedly re-edited based on an old draft to try and catch the Extreme Programming (XP) bandwagon.
Scrum is fundamentally a management technique, aimed at getting the most from development teams. As such it shares some principles with the new programming methodologies but, tellingly, many of the things which can lower the stress and help make software development fun are absent. There's no "40 hour week", developers are encouraged to put in whatever is necessary, even if it means working all night. There's no "Pair Programming", and mere programmers are actively discouraged from contacting the customers or users to get instant answers and decisions.
Where Scrum scores is in heavyweight, bureaucratic organizations, and its team isolation techniques can help to get a more extreme approach off the ground. Be prepared to abandon it like a first-stage booster if you do get XP into orbit, though.
The production quality of this book is poor. The illustrations are laughable pixelated screen dumps, and the same information could have been got across in a book half the size.
If you are a team leader of a project in chaos, and need a way out, this might be just what you need. But don't ever forget that your team are people, not just "resources".
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