Whether you’re just getting started with Agile or have been practicing for years, there’s always more to learn about the principles, practices, and mindsets that make Agile a powerful approach. Over the years, I’ve read a number of books that have deepened my understanding of Agile and helped me work more effectively in diverse team environments. These books offer inspiration, actionable tips, and in-depth knowledge that will undoubtedly enrich your Agile journey.
List shown below is in random order
Scrum A Pocket Guide – 4th edition: A Smart Travel Companion Kindle Edition
by Gunther Verheyen (Author)
This pocket guide to Scrum is the one book for everyone who wants to learn or re-learn about Scrum. The book describes the framework as it was designed and intended, with a strong focus on the purpose to the rules and adding an historical perspective to Scrum and the Agile movement.
As the balance of society keeps shifting from industrial labor to digital work, complexity and unpredictability keep increasing. The need for agility through Scrum increases equally, in and beyond software and product development.
This 4th edition of Scrum - A Pocket Guide, while introducing some changes in terminology, more than ever offers the clarity and insights on Scrum that many organizations need, more than ever. It will help people and their organizations properly shape their Scrum, regardless of their domain or business.
Scrum – A Pocket Guide is an extraordinarily competent book. It flows with insight, understanding, and perception. This should be the de facto standard handout for all looking for a complete, yet clear overview of Scrum without being bothered by irrelevancies.(Ken Schwaber, Scrum co-creator) The author, Gunther Verheyen, is a seasoned Scrum practitioner (2003). He has been employing Scrum since 2003. He was partner to Ken Schwaber and Director of the Professional Scrum series at . He is the founder of Ullizee-Inc and engages with people and organizations as an independent Scrum Caretaker on a journey of humanizing the workplace with Scrum.
Professional Product Owner, The: Leveraging Scrum as a Competitive Advantage
By McGreal Don (auteur), Jocham Ralph (auteur)
The Professional Product Owner's Guide to Maximizing Value with Scrum "This book presents a method of communicating our desires, cogently, coherently, and with a minimum of fuss and bother." Ken Schwaber, Chairman & Founder, Scrum.org The role of the Product Owner is more crucial than ever. But it's about much more than mechanics: it's about taking accountability and refocusing on value as the primary objective of all you do. In The Professional Product Owner, two leading experts in successful Scrum product ownership show exactly how to do this. You'll learn how to identify where value can be found, measure it, and maximize it throughout your entire product lifecycle. Drawing on their combined 40+ years of experience in using agile and Scrum in product management, Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham guide you through all facets of envisioning, emerging, and maturing a product using the Scrum framework.McGreal and Jocham discuss strategy, showing how to connect Vision, Value, and Validation in ROI-focused agile product management. They lay out Scrum best-practices for managing complexity and continuously delivering value, and they define the concrete practices and tools you can use to manage Product Backlogs and release plans, all with the goal of making you a more successful Product Owner. Throughout, the authors share revealing personal experiences that illuminate obstacles to success and show how they can be overcome. Define success from the "outside in," using external customer-driven measurements to guide development and maximize valueBring empowerment and entrepreneurship to the Product Owner's role, and align everyone behind a shared business modelUse Evidence-Based Management (EBMgt) to invest in the right places, make smarter decisions, and reduce riskEffectively apply Scrum's Product Owner role, artifacts, and eventsPopulate and manage Product Backlogs, and use just-in-time specificationsPlan and manage releases, improve transparency, and reduce technical debtScale your product, not your ScrumUse Scrum to inject autonomy, mastery, and purpose into your product team's workWhatever your role in product management or agile development, this guide will help you deliver products that offer more value, more rapidly, and more often.Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.
Applying Scrum with Kanban: A Pointless Book!
by Mr Andy Hiles (auteur)
Kanban is the perfect strategy for optimising flow, especially when applied with Scrum.
But how do they work in perfect harmony when for years the have been touted as adversaries?
My name is Andy Hiles and as an experienced Scrum Master, Scrum and Kanban trainer and a recognised contributor to the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams from Scrum.org, I felt there was a gap or lack of practical explanation between the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams and the content of the Professional Scrum with Kanban course.
Are you confused about the purpose of Story-Points?
Have you been asked 'When will it be done?' and not had any confident answer?
Or indeed been asked to provide velocity calculations or number of sprints as a deterministic solution?
Perhaps you are under confident in applying Kanban or unsure of how it could complement your Scrum Team?
My aim for this book was to present a more complete view of how someone could actually utilise the guidance and learnings in a practical way, for teams, in real life. Hence, this book was my way of trying to fit all the pieces of the puzzle together to fit some sort of practical, relatable experience.
Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams
by Jeff Gothelf (auteur), Josh Seiden (auteur)
Lean UX is synonymous with modern product design and development. By combining human-centric design, agile ways of working, and a strong business sense, designers, product managers, developers, and scrum masters around the world are making Lean UX the leading approach for digital product teams today.
In the third edition of this award-winning book, authors Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden help you focus on the product experience rather than deliverables. You'll learn tactics for integrating user experience design, product discovery, agile methods, and product management. And you'll discover how to drive your design in short, iterative cycles to assess what works best for businesses and users. Lean UX guides you through this change--for the better.
Facilitate the Lean UX process with your team with the Lean UX Canvas
Ensure every project starts with clear customer-centric success criteria
Understand the role of designer on an agile team
Write and contribute design and experiment stories to the backlog
Ensure that design work takes place in every sprint
Build product discovery into your team's "velocity"
The Professional Agile Leader: The Leader's Journey Toward Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations
by Ron Eringa (auteur), Kurt Bittner (auteur), Laurens Bonnema (auteur)
Hone Your Agile Leadership Skills to Help Your Organization Transform and Thrive
To leverage the immense opportunities associated with accelerating change, organizations need teams capable of trying new ideas quickly, learning from their experiences, and adapting based on that learning. Helping these teams to grow and thrive requires agile leaders who support, inspire, and encourage, and who can leave behind the management skills of directing, monitoring, and rewarding or punishing.
The Professional Agile Leader is a realistic, practical guide, written by experienced agile leaders who share their collective experiences in helping agile leaders to grow responsive and adaptive teams. They structure powerful lessons around a case study based on decades of experience helping agile leaders achieve and sustain agile transformation. Best of all, they never settle for high-level hand-waving--they show you how it's really done.
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
by Jeff Sutherland (auteur), J.J. Sutherland (auteur)
The revolutionary “Red Book” that helped a generation work smarter, better, and faster—now expanded and updated with new stories, new ideas, and new methods to radically improve the way you and your company deliver results
If you’ve ever been startled by how fast the world is changing, the Scrum framework is one of the reasons why. Productivity gains in workflow of as much as 1,200 percent have been recorded, and there’s no more lucid—or compelling—explainer of Scrum and its bright promise than Jeff Sutherland. The thorny problem that Sutherland began tackling back then boils down to this: People are spectacularly bad at doing things with agility and efficiency. Best-laid plans go up in smoke. Teams often work at cross-purposes to one another. And when the pressure rises, unhappiness soars.
Woven with insights from martial arts, judicial decision making, advanced aerial combat, robotics, and Sutherland’s experience as a West Point–educated fighter pilot, a biometrics expert, a medical researcher, an early innovator of ATM technology, and a C-level executive at eleven different technology companies, this book will take you to Scrum’s front lines, where Sutherland’s system has brought the FBI into the twenty-first century, helped support John Deere’s supply chain amid a global pandemic and supply chain shortage, reduced poverty in the Third World, and even planned weddings and accomplished weekend chores.
Agile Leadership Toolkit: Learning to Thrive with Self-Managing Teams
by Peter Koning (auteur)
If you lead in organizations that have adopted agile methods, you know it's crucial to create the right environment for your agile teams. Traditional tools such as Gantt charts, detailed plans, and internal KPIs aren't adequate for complex and fast-changing markets, but merely trusting participants and teams to self-manage isn't sufficient, either. In Agile Leadership Toolkit, long-time agile leader Peter Koning provides an invaluable steering wheel for agile leaders and their teams.
Drawing on his extensive experience helping leaders drive more value from agile, Koning offers a comprehensive toolkit for continuously improving your environment, including structures, metrics, meeting techniques, and governance for creating thriving teams that build disruptive products and services. Koning thoughtfully explains how to lead agile teams at the large scale, and how team members fit into both the team and the wider organization. You'll learn how to:
Provide the inspiring direction agile teams need to work smarter and explore better solutions
Facilitate ownership, building "can-do" teams that continually look to improve
Accelerate learning by integrating users into a fast learning loop
Design and improve habits that support your agile culture
Refined through implementation experience at multiple enterprises, Agile Leadership Toolkit is the only guide to agile leadership that's connected with Scrum.org's authoritative leadership programs.
The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations
by Gene Kim (auteur), Jez Humble (auteur), Patrick Debois (auteur), John Willis (auteur)
This award-winning and bestselling business handbook for digital transformation is now fully updated and expanded with the latest research and new case studies!
Professional Scrum Team
by Götz Peter (auteur), Schirmer Uwe (auteur)
The Practical Guide to Optimizing Product Value through Better Teamwork with Scrum
"Professional Scrum is hard, not because the ideas are hard, but because it requires persistence, focus, and dedication to not let the day-to-day realities get in the way. In this book, Peter, Uwe, and Kurt have provided a collection of materials to help the Scrum Team deliver value and feel happy doing it."
--Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org
Teams and individuals find the rules of the Scrum Framework to be easy to describe but challenging to implement. The Professional Scrum Team helps you bring the Scrum Framework rules to life in your everyday work, optimizing both team and individual performance and creating more value.
Three leading Scrum experts bring together proven practices based on decades of real-life experience participating in, leading, and supporting Scrum Teams. They introduce a team as it starts out with Scrum and follow it as it gains hard-won practical experience, gradually mastering the intense collaboration that Scrum demands.
User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product
byJeff Patton (auteur)
User story mapping is a valuable tool for software development, once you understand why and how to use it. This insightful book examines how this often misunderstood technique can help your team stay focused on users and their needs without getting lost in the enthusiasm for individual product features. Author Jeff Patton shows you how changeable story maps enable your team to hold better conversations about the project throughout the development process. Your team will learn to come away with a shared understanding of what you’re attempting to build and why. * Get a high-level view of story mapping, with an exercise to learn key concepts quickly * Understand how stories really work, and how they come to life in Agile and Lean projects * Dive into a story’s lifecycle, starting with opportunities and moving deeper into discovery * Prepare your stories, pay attention while they’re built, and learn from those you convert to working software
All Together
