Evan's book reviews by Evan Leybourn on

Core agile edition

I read a lot - not all of it related to agile or business management, but enough. Below are some of the important books that have shaped my thinking (and writing). Not all of them a great (as you can see from my ranking), but they all contain some interesting ideas. This group of reviews will focus on those books that relate to core agile frameworks.

5/5

Regardless of your field or industry, this book should change the way you think about work. While many of the concepts in this book date back to the early 20th century, this book brings a new approach to knowledge work and should be foundational reading for any product development business.

4/5

Quality control is everyone’s business. One of the concepts I loved about this book was the emphasis placed on making quality everyone’s responsibility. While this shouldn’t be a new concept, too many organisations (whether they are in the software industry or not) forget this critical fact. Beck’s TDD approach is by far one of the simplest mechanisms for encouraging this behaviour and integrating quality control into the software (or in fact any work) lifecycle. Well recommended read.

3/5

The seminal work on Scrum, but there have been better works since. I first read this book back in 2003 and it definitely opened my understanding of agile development. However, in many ways it has been superseded by many of the books written since. I’d recommend it for anyone who wants to see where Scrum all started.

3/5

Palmer & Felsing provide a practical guide on how to use FDD in software development projects. One of the lesser known Agile frameworks, FDD is a powerful approach to development by breaking down a product design by feature. This book should be read by any developer wanting to add a new capability to their Agile toolkit.