The Scrum Field Guide

The book is designed for you to be able to read any chapter, in any order, at any time. Each chapter starts out with a story pulled from a team, company, or project that I worked on or coached. As you might expect, I’ve changed the names to protect the innocent (and even the guilty). Once you read the story, which will likely sound familiar in some fashion, I walk you through the model. The model is what I use in the field to help address the issues evident in the story. Some of the models might feel uncomfortable, or you might believe they won’t work for your company. I urge you to fight the

instinct to ignore the advice or to modify the model. Try it at least three times and see what happens. You might be surprised. At the end of each chapter, I summarize the keys to success—those factors that can either make or break your implementation.

This book is organized in five parts.

• Part I, “Getting Prepared,” gives you advice on getting started with Scrum, helping you set up for success. If you are just thinking about Scrum or are just beginning to use it, start there.

• Part II, “Field Basics,” discusses items that, once you get started down the agile path, help you over some of the initial stumbling blocks that teams and organizations encounter. If you’ve gotten your feet wet with Scrum but are running into issues, you might want to start here.

• Part III, “First Aid,” is where I deal with some of the larger, deeper issues that companies face, such as adding people to projects or fixing dysfunctional daily standup meetings. These are situations you’ll likely find yourself in at one point or another during your first year. These chapters help you triage and treat the situation, allowing your team to return to a healthy state.

• Part IV, “Advanced Survival Techniques,” contains a series of items that teams seem to struggle with regardless of where they are in their adoption—things such as costing projects, writing contacts, and addressing documentation in agile and Scrum projects.

• Part V, “Wilderness Essentials,” contains chapters that focus on overlooked, yet just as costly, problems that most organizations face when they are in the middle of their agile adoption, such as managing risks, interviewing, getting it right the first time, and more.

If you are starting from scratch and have no idea what Scrum is, I’ve included a short description in the appendix to help familiarize you with the terms. You might also want to do some more reading on Scrum before diving into this book.

Coverage includes

• Bringing teams and new team members on board

• Creating a workable definition of "done"

• Planning for short-term wins, and removing impediments to success

• Balancing predictability and adaptability in release planning

• Running productive daily scrums

• Fixing failing sprints

• Accurately costing projects, and measuring the value they deliver

• Managing risks in dynamic Scrum projects

• Prioritizing and estimating backlogs

• Working with distributed and offshore teams

• Institutionalizing improvements, and extending agility throughout the organization

If you are thinking about getting started with Scrum or agile, are at the beginning of your journey, or have been at it a year or so but feel like you’ve gotten lost along the way, this book is for you. I’m officially targeting companies that are within six months of starting a project to those that are a year into their implementation—an 18-month window.

This is a book for people who are pragmatic. If you are looking for theory and esoteric discussions, grab another of the many excellent books on Scrum and agile. If, on the other hand, you want practical advice and real data based on my experience running projects both at Microsoft and while coaching teams and consulting at large Fortune 100 companies, this book fits the bill.

Regardless of where we are on our agile journey, we all need a friendly reminder that what we are experiencing is normal, some suggestions on how to deal with issues, and a few keys for success. This book gives you all that in a format that allows you to read only the chapter you need, an entire section, or the whole thing. Its real-life situations will resonate with you, and its solutions can be applied by any team. Turn the page and read the stories. This field guide will become a trusted companion as you experience the highs and lows of Scrum and Extreme Programming.