Why This Book
The book What to Expect When You're Expecting saved our marriage when our first child was born. In moments we felt we were going insane, that book helped us to realize that we were going through a normal process that parents have gone through for generations. We took comfort in the knowledge that the changes and feelings we were experiencing were not new to the world, just new to us. The book gave us a glimpse of the milestones and obstacles waiting around the next corner and anticipated our questions with enough clarity and examples to allow us to address our baby’s needs.
My first Agile project felt a bit like my first year as a father. Most of the time, I was lost and unsure about where to turn. What I needed was a How to Survive Your First Year of Scrum book!
Since no such book existed at the time, my team and I muddled through as best we could. As the project champion, I built a team that was open to experimenting and evolving to Scrum and agile. We were determined to become better, and better we became. We read a new book every other week, and experimented with the concepts and ideas in that book. It was not easy; we made as many bad decisions as we made good ones. It took a lot of discipline and patience to work through our issues and team dysfunctions, but we did it. We constantly asked ourselves, “Should we be progressing the way we are? What are we missing and what can we improve?” What was missing was a book that was only one step ahead of where we were as a team.
These days, when coaching teams that are trying to survive Scrum, I always ask how their adoption is progressing. They inevitably reply with a long list of problems they are having. Without fail, their list mirrors the list of problems I encountered on my first Scrum project. New teams struggle with building a release plan, identifying and prioritizing requirements and creating potentially releasable software within a sprint.
This book targets the crucial first year and puts it into perspective. Just like the parents who need reassurance that what they are experiencing is normal, this book will help reassure teams that are starting out with Scrum that what they are experiencing may be new to them, but is common to teams the world over. This book provides real-world stories, examples and exercises that an executive, manager or team member can use to survive the experience of transitioning to Scrum. The target audience for this book are teams that are between -3 and +12 months in their Scrum adoption.
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