The Scrum Field Guide ─ Agile Advice for Your First Year and Beyond

Th>The Scrum Field Guide will give you skills and confidence to adopt Scrum more rapidly, more successfully, and with far less pain and fear. Long-time Scrum practitioner Mitch Lacey identifies major challenges associated with early-stage Scrum adoption, as well as deeper issues that emerge after companies have adopted Scrum, and describes how other organizations have overcome them. You’ll learn how to gain “quick wins” that build support, and then use the flexibility of Scrum to maximize value creation across the entire process.

In 30 brief, engaging chapters, Lacey guides you through everything from defining roles to setting priorities to determining team velocity, choosing a sprint length, and conducting customer reviews. Along the way, he explains why Scrum can seem counterintuitive, offers a solid grounding in the core agile concepts that make it work, and shows where it can (and shouldn’t) be modified. Coverage includes

• Getting teams on board, and bringing new team members aboard after you’ve started
• Creating a “definition of done” for the team and organization
• Implementing the strong technical practices that are indispensable for agile success
• Balancing predictability and adaptability in release planning
• Keeping defects in check
• Running productive daily standup meetings
• Keeping people engaged with pair programming
• Managing culture clashes on Scrum teams
• Performing “emergency procedures” to get sprints back on track
• Establishing a pace your team can truly sustain
• Accurately costing projects, and measuring the value they deliver
• Documenting Scrum projects effectively
• Prioritizing and estimating large backlogs
• Integrating outsourced and offshored components

New coverage to this edition includes material on Immersive Interviewing, the Value of Collaborative Estimation, and Achieving Competitive Advantage with Business Alignment.

Packed with real-world examples from Lacey’s own experience, this book is invaluable to everyone transitioning to agile: developers, architects, testers, managers, and project owners alike.

Mitch Lacey is founder of Mitch Lacey & Associates, Inc., a software consulting and training firm that specializes in helping teams and companies improve performance by adopting Scrum and other agile practices. Lacey cut his agile teeth at Microsoft, in both product ownership and ScrumMaster roles. Today, drawing on nearly twenty-five years of software experience, he coaches, trains, and practices with agile teams at a wide spectrum of organizations. A CST and PMI Project Management Professional (PMP), he has served on the board of the Scrum Alliance and Agile Alliance, and chaired the Agile 2012 conference.