Features
Generally speaking, it's quite difficult to single out any specific features of this book. Perhaps I’ll just note that the book doesn’t claim to be some golden standard of Scrum and isn’t better or worse than other materials on this topic. It’s suitable both for beginners and for those with some experience. One last thing I’ll mention as a feature is that the book is quite short, so you can read through it quickly.
Advantages
- Roles and their responsibilities are described clearly enough
- The sequence of the book is well structured
- All major stages of this methodology are covered
- Each stage is illustrated with multiple examples, explanations, and tips
- There are illustrations that fit well into the context and serve as helpful visual explanations
- There are answers to questions (possible and most frequently asked ones in the reader’s mind)
- Not only work is mentioned, but also the importance of rest
- The book covers all essential stages — from working with the backlog to testing and code releases
- Communication is described using (or rather combining) Scrum with other practices (like pair programming and XP)
- Some practical tools are mentioned that can be used for Scrum (task trackers and others)
- Working with multiple Scrum teams is also described
Disadvantages
- It seemed to me that there’s absolutely nothing about the origin of Scrum in this book. I’m not sure how necessary that is, but while reading another Scrum book, I was impressed (when I first found out) that Scrum has its own founders, who got together during a mountain retreat, had fun, and at the same time laid down the basic principles of Agile development.
- Although I mentioned in the advantages that some tools are listed and the full development cycle is covered, there are no concrete details about how to use those tools, nor is there anything about CI/CD solutions. Each stage is described individually and described well, but there are no examples specifically tailored for CI/CD use.
As I already mentioned above, this book is neither better nor worse than others. If you’re already familiar with Scrum, you probably won’t find much new here. But at the same time, if you think you know Scrum but lack real hands-on experience, or if your team is already using it and you just want to look at it from a different perspective — then briefly going through this book won’t hurt.
