Author: Richard Hundhausen
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Pages: 432
ISBN: 978-0136789239
Print: 0136789234
Kindle: B08F5HCNJ7
Audience: Developers interested in Scrum
Rating: 5
Reviewer: Kay Ewbank

This is a book designed for teams using Scrum and Azure DevOps together for developing complex products. The author, Richard Hundhausen, says it wouldn't be as useful if the product you're working on isn't complex.

Part One of the book focuses on 'scrumdamentals', which deserves a groan in its own right. It sets out to establish a baseline understanding of the Scrum framework, professional Scrum, Azure DevOps and the Azure Boards service. Each of these gets its own chapter explaining the concepts and what's important about how you work with them.

Part Two of the book moves on to the practical application of how a professional Scrum team can use the tools covered earlier to create and manage a product backlog, plan a sprint, create a sprint backlog, and collaborate well during the sprint. I thought the chapter on effective collaboration was particularly interesting. Hundhausen discusses the various stages of group development - forming, storming, norming and performing, along with a fifth stage, swarming, where all the developers work simultaneously on the same PBI (product backlog items).

Throughout the book Hundhausen has interesting insights into Scrum philosophy, tips and wrinkles. In particular, he discusses smells - situations and traps that should be avoided. He says Scrum experts develop a 'nose' for problem situations and traps that teams and their members should watch out for, identify, avoid and when encountered, mitigate. It's an interesting idea that I think works for more than just Scrum; in most professions an experienced practitioner develops the ability to recognise and avoid such problems, but I've seldom seen it discussed in formal terms.

The third part of the book is about 'improving', and it has a chapter on defining and improving a Scrum team's flow. There are also chapters looking at identifying challenges and dysfunctions to remove them, and how to adopt Scaled Professional Scrum to improve when working at scale.

Overall, this is an interesting and useful book. You can tell the author works using Scrum for real on big complex projects, and he writes in an accessible way that makes his experience accessible. Well worth reading.

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.