This book is about getting more out of Scrum, an intro to Scrum and its values, principles and practices, and a source of inspiration on how to apply it. This practical Scrum guide can help you how to plan and execute projects with Scrum, and on interfacing parts of the organization that use Agile with parts that don't, which is crucial to assure successful Agile software development.

For a detailed review of this book, and an interview with the author Ken Rubin, see http://www.infoq.com/articles/essential-scrum ( )

I've been part of a team doing Scrum for a couple of years now and still this book proved useful for me. I learned some new things and reinforced some other concepts, like estimates should be accurate, not precise - NICE!

The book begins by explaining the Cynefin framework and where Scrum falls in the system. A brief note about Kanban is interesting as well.

The core point of Scrum is 'inspect and adapt' being done at various levels - daily stand ups, sprint reviews, retrospectives and also during Scrum of Scrums. This bolsters the iterative development idea that is well suited for the evolution of an innovative product.

The authors' tone is a balanced one, evident when he talks about when not to use Scrum. He clearly knows his stuff and doesn't go on to boast about the ubiquity of Scrum. Of course, you can't learn a complex concept like Scrum by reading just one book. The categorization of Scrum concepts in this book helps to reuse it as a reference guide as well - you can easily jump to parts of a chapter to clarify your understanding on a future date.

The 'do your thing' in the last chapter was interesting where he encourages teams to create their own home rules in order to follow the guidelines of Scrum.

The only rue I have is that the italics/manuscript-ish font used in images is difficult to read on eBook readers.

All-in-all, a great book. ( )