Book: Scrum and XP from the Trenches

Friday, February 19. 2010

Book: Scrum and XP from the Trenches

Just finished reading this "agile war story" by Henrik Kniberg. A very pragmatic description about how agile methods are deployed in real projects. A lot of the learnings i went through in during the last years are summarized very well in the book. Plus a lot of extra ideas and experience. If i had read this book 2 years ago, it would have saved me a lot of time and pain. Now i can say: My learnings are the same as Henriks so it seems that we are not so far away from "good" practices (who knows "best practices" in this area?).

Some of the statements that i found most interesing in the book were:

- TDD was the real game changer. Scrum and XP are great tools for making a project more efficient and transparent. But what really made a difference to their whole approach of coding and quality was TDD.

- Even if you invest huge amounts of time in automated testing, you still need manual acceptance tests before shipping a release.

- There is no real best practice on how to deal with bug fixing for previous sprint results during following sprints. There are a couple of options, but none of them work perfect.

Also in other areas he writes that there is no recipe how it has to be done. Scrum gives a good direction, but it is not a 100% solution for all problems that may occur. The gaps need to be filled with experience and creativity...

I like this book a lot. It gives me the "you are not alone"-Feeling regarding the situation in real-life project work. There is so much talking about the theory and rules behind Scrum and XP in conferences and other books. But here you see how relevant all your small daily issues are that come up in your project. And that they dont mean "you are doing Scrum wrong", but "you need to figure this one out for yourself".

Posted by Gaylord Aulke at 12:37 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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Hello,
I was the product owner in the book and thus partly responsible for the processes that Henrik described in the book. Although I disagree with some of the messages, it is still good reading material and your conclusiones are really good.

There has been an "over-optimism" in the development industry regarding automated testing. It is really good for TDD and securing the development platform, but to replace the regression and integration testing with automated tests is *extremely* costly. I have done it in the telecom industry where the systems are standardized and the same all over the world, but in a fast changing environment, you end up spending more time on writing a framework to execute automatic tests then you would do testing them manually. We tried here but finally I had to discontinue the initiative to automate the regression tests that was done.

If you have any other questions, feel free to contact me and I can answer any more questions.

Regards,
Linus - the P.O.

#1 Linus Dalin (Homepage) on 2010-03-02 10:00 (Reply)

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