Who This Book Is For

This book assumes that you’re currently on a Scrum team. In Chapter 2, we provide a very brief introduction to Scrum, but after that we jump straight into the framework. Experience will help you get the most out of this book, but you can also use it to bootstrap your Scrum knowledge and get started down the path of good Scrum.

We wrote this book primarily for Scrum masters. If you’re a new Scrum master, we help you avoid common traps that are easy to fall into, and give you the tools to understand the “why” behind the deeper aspects of the Scrum framework. If you’re an experienced Scrum master, we provide practical tips and concrete suggestions that can help you deepen your understanding of how Scrum works—or could work if your organization fully embraces the Scrum principles and values.

If you manage people who are on a Scrum team, there’s lots of useful info here for you, too. We present real-world examples of bad situations and provide explanations of how we’ve helped those teams succeed.

Scrum at Scale

Although some of our stories and the techniques in this book are about or can be applied at scale, this book doesn’t focus on ways to help you scale Scrum in environments where several development teams are working on one product. If you’re considering scaling Scrum, we recommend getting really good at Scrum at a small level first, and then thinking long and hard about whether scaling is truly necessary.