Agile Project Management with Scrum (Microsoft Professional)
The book is interesting in the way it presents case studies of applying Scrum to software development projects in different kind of organizations, and in what one has to do to stop relying on meaningless Gantt charts and Microsoft Project constructions to plan and report project progress. I felt that the day-to-day activities of Scrum needed a bit more space than the appendix, and to how Scrum can be integrated with other practices, such as task estimation techniques: for example, we’re told that at the Project Backlog meeting the Team should estimate the work it can do in a Sprint, and while I agree that the estimating activity isn’t part of Scrum I would find very useful mentioning which kind of estimating technique can be used in such a short time.
Also the treatment of Scrum for fixed-price, fixed-date contracts is way too light for me, as it is one of the situations I’m most likely to find myself into (I find very interesting that fixed-scope doesn’t get mentioned along fixed-price and fixed-date). For this reason and for the anecdotical tone of the book, my global judgment is fair: it was difficult not to feel that a Scrum project cannot be successful unless the author is present…