Agile, as a software development process, is frequently misunderstood to mean no requirements, we’ll figure out the design as we go, and anything remotely resembling a planning meeting is simply out of the question. This book very effectively puts that misconception to rest.

For those new to Agile and Scrum development practices, it’s frequently difficult to discern not only what you need to be doing but how to tell if you’re doing it correctly. Without spending real sprints with experienced practitioners, it’s difficult to understand the impact of trade-offs that occur constantly during realworld project development. Are your sprints too long? Too short? Are you spending too much time doing retrospectives? Why exactly are you doing them to begin with? Andrew Pham’s and Phuong-Van Pham’s book not only helps explain why you should be doing a particular Agile or Scrum practice, but also provides hard-earned experience in helping you understand if you’re doing it properly. This book provides the desperately needed straw man for activities that are frequently new to everyone on the team.

One of my favorite parts of the book is the time spent looking at Agile from the non-developer perspective. What does it mean to you, as an enterprise architect, if your organization has decided to start using Scrum for its development process? What if you’re the customer? What if you’re in charge of the effort and need to somehow meld the Agile process you want to support with financial and progress tracking information in your department? For as much as some development teams like to think terms like ROI and EVM are for management to deal with, this book helps tie a project together without losing what makes Agile so effective.

Unlike what is sometimes taught in the theoretical classroom, this book is for professionals who would like—and need—to know how to apply Agile and Scrum to real-life situations. This is to say that this is not a book for process dogmatists but for professional pragmatists whose mission is to deliver real software in real companies with real people and real situations.

Deploying Agile, and especially Scrum, processes into an organization is no small feat, given all the constraints we know. This book is a valuable resource to help make that a reality.

Dan Pilone

Author, Head First Software Development and Head First iPhone Development

Founder and Managing Partner of Element 84, LLC