Jeff Sutherland and J.J. Sutherland
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
ISBN: 978-0-385-34645-0
Agile and Scrum are the latest breakthrough in software development and project management. Rather than releasing completed software packages after months or years of in-house design and development (like some of the big software releases over the years like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop), Agile relies on small, incremental releases and tests assumptions all along the way. A “scrum” is a team that practices agile development techniques. Agile and Scrum are well suited to the fast pace of startups, where time is money and there’s very little money to go around.
I received a copy of Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time during my stint working on an internal project for NewBoCo during the 2016 cohort of the Iowa Startup Accelerator. That program ran completely on Scrum and Agile, and because of that, all of the teams received a day-long crash course on these techniques. I had heard of these techniques before taking on the project, but I wasn’t sure how it all worked. The crash course was a fantastic introduction to the terminology, but this book was an amazing tutorial and a great read.
Jeff Sutherland, one of the authors of the book, is the creator of Scrum. That makes this book the definitive handbook and resource on the topic. It covers the differences between Waterfall-style development (one big software release over the course of many months or years) and the Agile system of many small releases with quick iterations done using the Scrum cadence. It also discusses siloed roles, such as designers and developers, working alone versus cross-functional teams, where designers and developers work directly with a project manager or “owner.” Sutherland also talks about the “kaizen” system used in Japanese manufacturing, which emphasizes continuous quality improvement and transparency.
While I thought that the crash course on Agile and Scrum at the beginning of my time at the accelerator was a great way to introduce the concept, I really felt like I understood everything much better after reading this book. There were a number of takeaways at the end of each chapter that allowed me to examine what I’d learned, and helped guide further learning as I functioned as the “owner” on that internal project. I learned how to sort and prioritize tasks much better than I would have just from the one-day seminar on Scrum and Agile.
The book wasn’t a super quick read, but it was manageable in a couple of days. It was not as technical as I thought it might be, even with the amount of new vocabulary needed to fully understand the process. What seemed to slow the pace of reading down was pausing to reflect on the novelty of the system and to take notes. Scrum turns the development cycle on its head, and having worked more in a Waterfall-like system in previous jobs and on previous projects, it took a bit of time to full transition over to this new way of thinking. If you are already familiar with Agile, this book should be a quick read.
Overall, 9/10, would recommend as an excellent way of understanding the thinking behind the Scrum system of software development and project management. It will help you to better organize your projects and move small, incremental updates out the door much faster than by using Agile alone, and much better than using the outmoded Waterfall development system. The knowledge gained from this book has helped me with other projects since participating in the accelerator, and I think every project manager, designer, and developer, both inside and outside the startup world, would benefit from this text.