Tau Liang's Blog

Just like Mike Cohn’s previous books, Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum is an instant classic on this topic. It is not just a book about scrum, it has tons of information about how software development teams could improve their development process. This book starts with an introduction on how teams could adapt scrum, then dives into details about how individuals, teams and organizations could be fundamentally changed and transformed with scrum.  Mike Cohn not only does an awesome job of showing readers the ins and outs of agile practices, but also explains how to make these changes happen in the real world and points out the paths to get around the pitfalls and obstacles.

Having worked with scrum in the past for a few years and now picked it up again on my current team, I found this book not only a great pleasure to read, but also extremely insightful and practical.  Just a few things I found particularly interesting:

1. Sources of Organizational Gravity (Pages 38-40): HR, Marketing, Finance.
2. The How’s and Why’s of Individual Resistance (Pages 104-114): Diehards, Saboteurs, Followers, Skeptics.
3. A team’s time demands on their product owner and ScrumMaster move in different directions (Page 128): as the team moves faster, they will need more time from product owner.
4. Why two pizzas are enough (Page 178)
5. Embrace whole-team responsibility (P201)
6. The right level of detail (P308) on testing
7. Acknowledge significant cultural differences (P359). This is the one of the few books I ever read about software development process that actually talk about this.  A reasonably sized development team usually involve people from a diversified set of culture backgrounds. It will be advisable to be aware of this and deal with it. I picked a few countries of interest from the link on this.
   

   Country	PDI	IDV	MAS	UAI	LTO
   Brazil	69	38	49	76	65
   China *	80	20	66	30	118
   France	68	71	43	86
   Germany	35	67	66	65	31
   Hungary *	46	80	88	82	50
   India	77	48	56	40	61
   Iran	58	41	43	59
   Israel	13	54	47	81
   Poland *	68	60	64	93	32
   Romania *	90	30	42	90
   Russia *	93	39	36	95
   Thailand	64	20	34	64	56
   United States	40	91	62	46	29

   Let me end the review with a quote in the book from Peter Drucker:

Every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does to survive in the future.

It sums it all. If you want to learn about how to improve the way how software is built, this is the book to have.

1. http://www.geert-hofstede.com/hofstede_dimensions.php