Book Review - Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum

Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum by Craig Larman

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a fantastic book to help with the issues of taking scrum/agile/lean/xp from a small software development team into a much larger scale product development effort. The depth of knowledge and experience of the authors is demonstrated by the fact that they don't give any silver bullets, but describe tools for dealing with complexity of scaling.

The first half of the book on Thinking tools is well considered and useful. Most of it isn't a surprise to me, but the section is well written and distills the fundamentals of systems thinking, lean thinking, queuing theory, false dichotomies and being agile very well. These thinking tools are used to help the reader understand the concepts in the second part of the book on Organisational tools.

Organisational tools is fantastic, covering Feature teams, Teams, Requirement areas, Organisation, and Large-scale Scrum. Using experience and the thinking tools Larman & Vodde describe why you would adopt these tools to help scale. I regularly did the "d'oh, it's so obvious when you put it like that" forehead slap reading this section of the book.

The recommended readings and fantastic reference list at the end will ensure I blow another huge wad on books this year.




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Something you can talk about at dinner

Lying in the shade, drying off after swimming. My two boys jump on my back and proceed to blow loud, and long raspberries. There is the occasional pause for laughter if one of them lets out a particularly good sound.

My eldest takes a breather to tell me;

"Dad, you can talk about this at dinner"

Rasing boys

I was putting on a "rashie" as I was about to go for a swim and my eldest boy comes out with
"Dad your tummy is very big"

Fair enough, I do support the Australian reputation as the fattest nation and I do it well.

"yes Mate, it's too big" I reply.

"no Dad, it's way way way way waaaaaaaaay too big"