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The Professional Scrum Series #4
Mastering Professional Scrum: A Practitioners Guide to Overcoming Challenges and Maximizing the Benefits of Agility
“Our job as Scrum professionals is to continually improve our ability to use Scrum to deliver products and services that help customers achieve valuable outcomes. This book will help you to improve your ability to apply Scrum.”
–From the Foreword by Ken Schwaber, co-author of Scrum Mastering Professional Scrum is for anyone who wants to deliver increased value by using Scrum more effectively. Leading Scrum practitioners Stephanie Ockerman and Simon Reindl draw on years of Scrum training and coaching to help you return to first principles and apply Scrum with the professionalism required to achieve its transformative potential.
The authors aim to help you focus on proven Scrum approaches for improving quality, getting and using fast feedback, and becoming more adaptable, instead of “going through the motions” and settling for only modest improvements.
Whether you’re a Scrum Master, Development Team member, or Product Owner, you’ll find practical advice for facing challenges with transparency and courage, overcoming a wide array of common challenges, and continually improving your Scrum practice.
Realistically assess your current Scrum practice, and identify areas for improvement Recognize what a great Scrum Team looks like and get there Focus on “Done”–not “sort-of-Done” or “almost-Done” Measure and optimize the value delivered by every Product Increment Improve the way you plan, develop, and grow Clear away wider organizational impediments to agility and professionalism Overcome common misconceptions that stand in the way of progress Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.
–From the Foreword by Ken Schwaber, co-author of Scrum Mastering Professional Scrum is for anyone who wants to deliver increased value by using Scrum more effectively. Leading Scrum practitioners Stephanie Ockerman and Simon Reindl draw on years of Scrum training and coaching to help you return to first principles and apply Scrum with the professionalism required to achieve its transformative potential.
The authors aim to help you focus on proven Scrum approaches for improving quality, getting and using fast feedback, and becoming more adaptable, instead of “going through the motions” and settling for only modest improvements.
Whether you’re a Scrum Master, Development Team member, or Product Owner, you’ll find practical advice for facing challenges with transparency and courage, overcoming a wide array of common challenges, and continually improving your Scrum practice.
Realistically assess your current Scrum practice, and identify areas for improvement Recognize what a great Scrum Team looks like and get there Focus on “Done”–not “sort-of-Done” or “almost-Done” Measure and optimize the value delivered by every Product Increment Improve the way you plan, develop, and grow Clear away wider organizational impediments to agility and professionalism Overcome common misconceptions that stand in the way of progress Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.
224 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 11, 2019
106 people are currently reading
292 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
January 14, 2020
Good Book, that I can recommend to people who are new to scrum or agile. Not al lot of „new insights“. Good starting point for a Scrum Journey :-)
June 16, 2022
This is one of the best Scrum books I have read. Full of insights and valuable information. Totally recommended.
December 14, 2019
A self-organizing, cross-functional, collaborative team is more than a collection of individuals; it is an entirely new entity made up of people who themselves are wonderfully complex creatures. It takes time and conscious effort to bring a group of individuals together to form a cohesive team that is able to continuously evolve in terms of who it is and how it works. Without stability, the team never completely forms, and its sponsoring organization never truly reaps the benefits of a high-performing team. This does not mean that team composition should never change, only that when it does it will take time and conscious effort to help the individuals work as a team again.
At a fundamental level, establishing identity is about answering three big questions that guide a team on its journey toward high performance:
1. Why do we exist? (Purpose)
2. What is important to us? (Values)3. What do we want? (Vision)
The Team Process dimension includes practices, tools, and ways of working together. It touches on a wide variety of areas, including the following:
-Engineering practices and tools
-Quality practices and tools
-Product management practices and tools
-Product Backlog management practices and tools
-Effective use of Scrum events and artifacts
-Effective communication and collaboration
-Identification and removal of sources of waste
-Identification and removal of impediments
-Effective use and growth of team knowledge, skills, and capabilities
Culture is a body of habits that bind people together into a cohesive unit.
The way you start improving anything complex is to ask yourself three questions:
1. What hurts the most?
2. Why?
3. What are small experiments we can run that will deliver the most value?
When you design the experiment, be clear about the following points:
-What are you trying to learn?
-How will you measure success?
-How soon can you get feedback?
Effective self-organization requires three things: shared goals, clear accountabilities, and boundaries.
-----------
The following questions are useful to stimulate a collaborative discussion about the DoD:
-What do we need to do to assist the people who will maintain the product (e.g., readable code, variable naming conventions)?
-How will we minimize technical debt (e.g., refactoring)?
-How will we test the product (e.g., unit testing, functional testing, regression testing)?
-What testing will be automated?
-What defects must be resolved (e.g., severity, type)?
-How will we meet performance and scalability requirements (e.g., transaction processing time, concurrent users)?
-Which development standards will guide us toward technical excellence?
-How will we verify conformance to our team’s development standards (e.g., peer reviews)?
-How will we validate and ensure data quality?
-How will we ensure that our product is secure?
-How will we ensure that our product meets regulatory, legal, or other compliance standards?
-What do we need to do to meet branding requirements?
-What do we need to do to ensure that our product is usable by people with disabilities (e.g., Americans with Disabilities Act [ADA] accessibility standards)?
-What documentation is needed to release to production (e.g., online help, updates to asset management system)?
Scrum Teams achieve flow optimization by adding the following four practices to their Scrum process:
-Visualization of the workflow
-Limiting WIP
-Active management of work items in progress
-Inspecting and adapting their definition of “workflow”.
The iron triangle for adaptive development consists of time, money, scope.
----
Automation is often addressed in the following order:
Version control
Automated build
Automated test
Automated packaging
Automated deployment
Empiricism Reduces Uncertainty by Taking Action, Not by Planning More.
At a fundamental level, establishing identity is about answering three big questions that guide a team on its journey toward high performance:
1. Why do we exist? (Purpose)
2. What is important to us? (Values)3. What do we want? (Vision)
The Team Process dimension includes practices, tools, and ways of working together. It touches on a wide variety of areas, including the following:
-Engineering practices and tools
-Quality practices and tools
-Product management practices and tools
-Product Backlog management practices and tools
-Effective use of Scrum events and artifacts
-Effective communication and collaboration
-Identification and removal of sources of waste
-Identification and removal of impediments
-Effective use and growth of team knowledge, skills, and capabilities
Culture is a body of habits that bind people together into a cohesive unit.
The way you start improving anything complex is to ask yourself three questions:
1. What hurts the most?
2. Why?
3. What are small experiments we can run that will deliver the most value?
When you design the experiment, be clear about the following points:
-What are you trying to learn?
-How will you measure success?
-How soon can you get feedback?
Effective self-organization requires three things: shared goals, clear accountabilities, and boundaries.
-----------
The following questions are useful to stimulate a collaborative discussion about the DoD:
-What do we need to do to assist the people who will maintain the product (e.g., readable code, variable naming conventions)?
-How will we minimize technical debt (e.g., refactoring)?
-How will we test the product (e.g., unit testing, functional testing, regression testing)?
-What testing will be automated?
-What defects must be resolved (e.g., severity, type)?
-How will we meet performance and scalability requirements (e.g., transaction processing time, concurrent users)?
-Which development standards will guide us toward technical excellence?
-How will we verify conformance to our team’s development standards (e.g., peer reviews)?
-How will we validate and ensure data quality?
-How will we ensure that our product is secure?
-How will we ensure that our product meets regulatory, legal, or other compliance standards?
-What do we need to do to meet branding requirements?
-What do we need to do to ensure that our product is usable by people with disabilities (e.g., Americans with Disabilities Act [ADA] accessibility standards)?
-What documentation is needed to release to production (e.g., online help, updates to asset management system)?
Scrum Teams achieve flow optimization by adding the following four practices to their Scrum process:
-Visualization of the workflow
-Limiting WIP
-Active management of work items in progress
-Inspecting and adapting their definition of “workflow”.
The iron triangle for adaptive development consists of time, money, scope.
----
Automation is often addressed in the following order:
Version control
Automated build
Automated test
Automated packaging
Automated deployment
Empiricism Reduces Uncertainty by Taking Action, Not by Planning More.
January 31, 2021
Nice starting point for Scrum Journey. I appreciated mostly parts of the book called "In Practice".👍
February 9, 2021
I started with this book to study for my PSM3 (see scrum.org) exam as it was recommended for it in many places. In the introduction and first chapters it felt not really fit for that purpose. So I took the exam without finishing the book.
Still, I kept reading. Because this book is an incredibly valuable source of deep understanding, tools and practices for anyone working with Scrum, especially Scrum Masters.
Scrum on!
Still, I kept reading. Because this book is an incredibly valuable source of deep understanding, tools and practices for anyone working with Scrum, especially Scrum Masters.
Scrum on!
February 28, 2022
Outlining common dysfunctions of Scrum, how to build trust on teams, tools such as Roman voting or impact maps, creating a helpful definition of done, what types of metrics to healthily grow a team and those that are dangerous or improper to communicate outwards, all excellent points of many more outlined within. Sections are concise and to the point with illustrations when necessary. Page tabs on 14, 37, 41, 52, 86-87, & 172.
June 7, 2020
This is one of the best practical books on the Scrum framework and its application that I’ve read. It stresses how to maximise the benefits and provides teams with plenty of challenges whatever their maturity or effectiveness. “Scrum done well is like a spotlight shining on your organisation and the way you work - the good and the bad.”
January 22, 2021
A very good handbook for Scrum Masters with the 'heart of Scrum' ("Done", empiricism, self-managing teams) in mind. The appendices are also very useful with all sorts of useful practices for teams. Not a quick-start guide - there's scrumguides.org for that - but definitely as a reference book.
April 10, 2023
Definitely overwritten in many areas. Just make each chapter a couple of pages shorter! It felt like reading an essay that was desperately trying to meet a word count.
Also a book for someone already practicing Scrum. Not what you need if you're still looking to be certified.
Also a book for someone already practicing Scrum. Not what you need if you're still looking to be certified.
July 3, 2023
Stephanie's understanding of the subtle requirements for making a great Scrum Master and Scrum Team is amazing. Some of the advice in here is a bit single-team focused, but it would all be something to strive for under any team makeup.
January 29, 2020
Always important to update our knowledge. Very good book for Scrum Masters.
May 7, 2022
good book with a lot tips and practices.
June 12, 2023
While it's deep and very informative, for me it was a little dull to reed.
July 11, 2024
This book is for whom wants to be get PSM2 certificate from scrum.org
December 1, 2024
A great book bringing some interesting perspectives for Scrum practitioners and how to become better as a team. Also contains some insights for managers as to the reason for using the framework and the real intent behind it.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews