Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I had mixed feeling when I saw this book. On one hand, I was excited about a Scrum book by Jeff Sutherland, one of the co-creators of Scrum. On the other hand, the title of the book actually bothered me. “The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time” felt wrong as a title for a Scrum book. Scrum and Agile development are about focusing on delivering value and being able to respond to changes and not so much about improving productivity. The title suggests a focus on (hyper) productivity rather than the focus on agility and value delivery. For me, Scrum is about maximizing the work not done… instead of maximizing the work done. This initial mixed feelings turned out to be spot on and I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone who would like a Scrum introduction. The minimum I would expect a book about Scrum to cover is…. well… Scrum. It doesn’t. It doesn’t explain Scrum except for the Appendix and even that does a poor job of it (Backlog Refinement? Anyone?). Instead, the book shared stories, mostly the hero kind of stories where someone comes in, introduces Scrum and saves the day. Some of the stories are nice and insightful. For me though, a bit too much of the stories had military backgrounds. The book is vague on what is Scrum. You almost get away with the feeling that Scrum is whatever happened to work in whatever place actually did something. An example of the latter is the discussion about Valve and Scrum. Value (a Games company) has done interesting things related to how they organize their organization… it is good and probably not Scrum. I am not sure whether Scrum isn’t actually used (much) in Valve, but the story of Valve and Scrum is intertwined in a wonderful way so that you get away with… ah Scrum! The book also covers a lot of techniques that are useful when adopting Scrum… but aren’t Scrum itself. It doesn’t separate practices that might be useful from Scrum itself. E.g relative estimating, velocity, taskboards, planning poker. All useful techniques, but not really the essence of Scrum. On planning poker, the history of planning poker seems to actually miss the real story about how James Grenning (not mentioned) created planning poker and instead talks about the story of Delphi…which wasn’t how planning poker was created. This also brings me to my last annoyance with the book, which is not getting facts right. There are a lot of examples for this, but let me take one or two. The story about Gantt charts. Early in the book, it talks about how Gantt charts are created by Henry Gantt (correct!). It then states “They were first used in World War I”, which as far as I know, is untrue. They were used in Wold War I, but that was definitively not the first usage of Gantt charts. Then, it comes with an interesting statement which is “We gave up on trench warfare, but somehow the ideas that organized it are still popular.” This suggests that Gantt charts were actually used for planning the war itself, which is as far as I know, not true. When looking at Wikipedia (or other articles), it mentions that Gantt charts were used in the war-time production… not in the war planning. The irony though is that later, Jeff Sutherland talks about Edwards Deming but leaves out that Deming was involved in war-time production… just like Henry Gantt was. The conclusion of unsuitability of Gantt charts to software projects (later stressed more) is true and relevant, though the facts used in the argument do not seem to be checked. So… conclusion. “Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time” is well written and full of bite-size stories that will make it easy reading. It isn’t a great book about Scrum though. If you want to know about Scrum and how to apply it in real life… this book is not recommended. If you have used Scrum for years and are curious what has influenced Jeff (and Ken) to create Scrum, then this is the right book for you. Thus, for most people, leave this book.