Monthly News from Mike Cohn and Mountain Goat Software

Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. 2 July 2012 I want to focus on one big bit of news for this month--a great new book on Scrum. The book is Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process by Kenneth Rubin. The book is a comprehensive overview of Scrum. It goes from the principles of agile through the mechanics of sprints to the roles on a Scrum team and all the way up to topics like technical debt and portfolio management with Scrum. A very helpful aspect of the book is the detailed "visual language," Kenny created while writing the book. He created icons for every possible aspect of Scrum and these are used to make up dozens and dozens of figures to illustrate all the work and knowledge flows of a Scrum project. His diagrams definitely go well beyond the typical double-loop depiction of Scrum. The book is well-written and draws on Kenny's experience introducing Scrum to over 200 organizations. I've worked with Kenny in various capacities over the past twelve years and I can highly recommend his book. In fact, I'd considered writing a book just like this until he'd told me he was already writing it. So I did the next best thing and asked him to include the book in the series I edit for Addison-Wesley The book is available on the Kindle now and Amazon shows it shipping on 6 August. Check it out: I'm sure you'll like it. Regards, Mike Cohn Want More Book Reviews? I've been very remiss at adding book reviews over the past couple of years. I've resolved to get better at that again so I'll be posting more book reviews from here on. In the meantime, you can check out prior book reviews on the Mountain Goat site. I tend to post reviews of books I like so all the reviews are good. There are plenty of books I don't like but I tend to stop halfway so it's not fair to review them (on the 1% chance the last half of the book is awesome). But, I do plan to post a review soon of a horrible book I'm reading in which the author tells us he learned about agile, under the name "Agile," two years before the Agile Manifesto came about. The book goes downhill from there. Continue to the list of book reviews... Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software has Certified ScrumMaster, Certified Scrum Product Owner, Succeeding with Agile, Effective User Stories and Agile Estimating & Planning courses scheduled in Boulder, Copenhagen, Dallas, London, Orange County, Oslo, San Diego, and Silicon Valley.

You're receiving this because you've subscribed via our site. Unsubscribe Now Update Subscription Preferences   Mountain Goat Software 1140 US Hwy 287 Suite 400-108 Broomfield, CO 80020 Add us to your address book