The Scrum Field Guide Agile Advice for Your First Year and Beyond

Thousands of organizations are adopting Scrum to transform the way they execute complex projects, in software and beyond. This guide will give you the skills and confidence needed to deploy Scrum, resulting in high-performing teams and satisfied customers. Drawing on years of hands-on experience helping companies succeed, Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) Mitch Lacey helps you overcome the major challenges of Scrum adoption and the deeper issues that emerge later.

Extensively revised to reflect improved Scrum practices and tools, this edition adds an all-new section of tips from the field.

Lacey covers many new topics, including immersive interviewing, collaborative estimation, and deepening business alignment. In 35 engaging chapters, you’ll learn how to build support and maximize value across your company.

Now part of the renowned Mike Cohn Signature Series on agile development, this pragmatic guide addresses everything from establishing roles and priorities to determining team velocity, setting sprint length, and conducting customer reviews.

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

Packed with real-world examples straight from Lacey’s experience, this book will be invaluable to anyone transitioning to Scrum, seeking to improve their early results, or trying to get back on track.

Mitch Lacey is founder of Mitch Lacey & Associates, Inc., a software consulting and training firm that specializes in helping teams and companies improve performance by adopting Scrum and other agile practices. Lacey cut his agile teeth at Microsoft, in both product ownership and ScrumMaster roles. Today, drawing on nearly twenty-five years of software experience, he coaches, trains, and practices with agile teams at a wide spectrum of organizations. A CST and PMI Project Management Professional (PMP), he has served on the board of the Scrum Alliance and Agile Alliance, and chaired the Agile 2012 conference.

Preface
Acknowledgments
About the Author

Chapter 1: Scrum: Simple, Not Easy
 
Part I: Getting Prepared
Chapter 2: Getting People On Board

Chapter 3: Using Team Consultants to Optimize Team Performance

Chapter 4: Determining Team Velocity

Chapter 5: Implementing the Scrum Roles

Chapter 6: Determining Sprint Length

Chapter 7: How Do We Know When We Are Done?

Chapter 8: The Case for a Full-Time ScrumMaster

Part II: Field Basics
Chapter 9: Why Engineering Practices Are Important in Scrum

Chapter 10: Core Hours

Chapter 11: Release Planning

Chapter 12: Decomposing Stories and Tasks

Chapter 13: Keeping Defects in Check

Chapter 14: Sustained Engineering and Scrum

Chapter 15: The Sprint Review

Chapter 16: Retrospectives

 
Part III: First Aid
Chapter 17: Running a Productive Daily Standup Meeting

Chapter 18: The Fourth Question in Scrum

Chapter 19: Keeping People Engaged with Pair Programming

Chapter 20: Adding New Team Members

Chapter 21: When Cultures Collide
Chapter 22: Sprint Emergency Procedures
 
Part IV: Advanced Survival Techniques
Chapter 23: Sustainable Pace
Chapter 24: Delivering Working Software
Chapter 25: Optimizing and Measuring Value
Chapter 26: Up-Front Project Costing
Chapter 27: Documentation in Scrum Projects
Chapter 28: Outsourcing and Offshoring
Chapter 29: Prioritizing and Estimating Large Backlogs
Chapter 30: Writing Contracts
Appendix: Scrum Framework

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.