An Overview of Two New Books

In this show, we give overviews of two new books by Net Objectives which we think you will find helpful: The Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams and another is Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility. We talk through both of these books: their motivation, their contents, why they are useful. In the next podcast, we will talk about the key ideas in each chapter by chapter of Lean-Agile Software Development, the ideas we have found is truly needed in order to be able to achieve enterprise agility.

The Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams

The Pocket Guide fills the gap between one of those 10 page ("marketing") overviews of Scrum and the thousands of pages that have been written on various good Scrum practices.

In our work, we found there was a need for a concise statement of what scrum is and a convenient distillation of the best practices. It also includes some techniques not traditionally taught in Scrum but which are very helpful. In 200 pages, it is a great tool to remind you what needs to happen from beginning to end of product development. Lots of checklists and templates to help you think.

Some of our clients have found this tool so helpful that they have created a "private label" version of the pocket guide for their own use. It served as a baseline for their own process. And we are willing to do that with others. If you are interested in this for yourself, drop us a note.

For more information see the resource page for the pocket guide.

Lean-Agile Software Development

The motivation of this book is to create a bigger picture what teams transitioning to agile need to do. Yes, teams need to understand the mechanics of the approach to get working, but there is more. Management needs to understand how to help teams work together. Business leadership prioritizing the right things to be working on. And there is a need to ensure technical quality so that development can be done in a sustainable way.

We also want to introduce Lean and how it applies to the transition. We don't believe "scaling up" is a very effective approach. Rather, taking a more holistic view is needed to get success. That is how Lean thinking helps.

This is not a book for experienced practitioners but for those who are picking Agile, Scrum, or Lean for software development. We expect you do understand a bit about Agile but not anything about Lean.

For more information see the resource page for the book.

Recommendations

• Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility by Alan Shalloway, Guy Beaver, and James R Trott
• The Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams by Alan Shalloway and James R Trott
• Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development by Scott Bain
• Design Patterns Explained by Alan Shalloway and James R Trott

For more information, visit us at http://www.netobjectives.com/