I had already very much like the first book written by the same authors “Scaling Lean & Agile Development – Thinking and Organisational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum” published in 2009. The risk when you have high expectations is being disappointed. It wasn’t the case with this book that is like the first one providing pragmatic advice on how to adopt an agile and lean approach.

Drawing from his own experience as developer and CTO in the game development industry, Keith Clinton has written a book that provides both an overall vision of the Agile and Scrum approaches combined with a detailed practice of these principles in the specific context of game software development. It gives therefore also a good introduction to the software practices of the gaming industry. I noticed for instance that the customer – outsourcer relationships are not very different from the relationships between game production companies and external developers.

In his foreword, Robert C. Martin wrote that he hates management book, but “this book is smart”. I think that this book might be smart because Jurgen is smart. To start with a full disclosure, I have to say that I know Jurgen Appelo since the beginning of 2008 when he wrote is first article for the Summer 2008 issue of Methods & Tools ” We Increment to Adapt, We Iterate to Improve”. You will already enjoy in this article the distinctive style that Jurgen adopt to investigate software development …

Transmitting human experience through written material is not easy. As Rachel Davies did in “Agile Coaching”, Lyssa Adkins manages to do it brilliantly in this book that covers the same topic. Based on her own experience of “recovering command-and-control project manager”, she write about all the circumstances where you can coach people, explaining both what you should and shouldn’t do.

Now that Agile has established itself as the dominant new trend in software development, the number of books that deal with this topic is increasing every day. Besides the fact that Mike Cohn is a recognized expert in the area of agile project management, why should you buy his book rather any other book published on the same topic? After reading it, I will say that not only you should buy it, but rather you HAD to buy it.

The goal of this book is to propose a vision of Agile software development that goes behind the current practices, more specifically Scrum, to integrate the principles of Lean development. To achieve this objective, the authors draw on their own experience in Agile consulting.

When you start reading this book, you will quickly understand that the authors are affiliated with IBM. This is nothing wrong per se, but this seems to influence too much the vision that the book proposes, ignoring approaches proposed by others. Including “iterative” in the title seems here to be only a marketing trick used to make it catchy. They don’t give you a precise definition of “iterative”, saying rather than it is a “modern method” (Tom Gilb was talking about evolutionary development …

There was a time when software developers worked with consultants that will do things for their company or teach some technical knowledge. Agile approaches have brought forward another type of people: coaches. According to Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley, a coach doesn’t tell you what to do, rather she shows you how she thinks you might do things and hope that it will help you to improve your situation. She leads by example. It is not easy to write a book on this type of topic. The authors recognize this …

This book from Craig Larman and Bas Vodde is a classic example of the fact that it is better to teach somebody to fish than to give him fish. It emphasizes that it is important to “be agile” more than to “do agile”. Approaches like Scrum or Lean are more frameworks to think about continuous improvement than tools that should be applied blindly like cooking recipes. The book will therefore tell you that “large-scale Scrum is Scrum” or that lean is not just kanban or waste reduction.