Kurt Bittner

Ron Eringa

Laurens Bonnema

Hone Your Agile Leadership Skills to Help Your Organization Transform and Thrive To leverage the immense opportunities associated with accelerating change, organizations need teams capable of trying new ideas quickly, learning from their experiences, and adapting based on that learning. Helping these teams to grow and thrive requires agile leaders who support, inspire, and encourage, and who can leave behind the management skills of directing, monitoring, and rewarding or punishing. The Professional Agile Leader is a realistic, practical guide, written by experienced agile leaders who share their collective experiences in helping agile leaders to grow responsive and adaptive teams. They structure powerful lessons around a case study based on decades of experience helping agile leaders achieve and sustain agile transformation. Best of all, they never settle for high-level hand-waving--they show you how it's really done. Reignite once-successful organizations that have lost their way Form cross-functional teams and empower them with purpose Learn to let go, as your teams start taking more responsibility Overcome forces that want to reel you back into the "old rules" Realign the whole organization, since agile and traditional models can't coexist forever Achieve the most challenging goal of all: changing culture Great agile leaders aren't born that way--they're regular people who care deeply about helping others achieve shared goals and have discovered a better way to lead. Whatever your role in the organization, this guide will help you master those skills and mindsets a whole lot faster. "Drawing on vast experience, Ron, Kurt, and Laurens tease out practical tips and patterns for good leadership [and show] how a leader can help shape the environment for agile teams to succeed. . . . The narrative style of the book makes it easy to read, and I am sure there will be many times that you see yourself in it." --From the Foreword by Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

The Leader's Journey Toward Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations

The Professional Agile Leader

Ian Spence

Discusses how to define and organize use cases that model the user requirements of a software application. The approach focuses on identifying all the parties who will be using the system, then writing detailed use case descriptions and structuring the use case model. An ATM example runs throughout the book. The authors work at Rational Software. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Use Case Modeling

Walker Royce

Mike Perrow

Results-Based Software Management: Achieve Better Outcomes with Finite Resources Effective software development is no longer merely an IT concern: today, it is crucial to the entire enterprise. However, most businesspeople are not ready to make informed decisions about software initiatives. The Economics of Iterative Software Development: Steering Toward Better Business Results will prepare them. Drawing on decades of software development and business experience, the authors demonstrate how to utilize practical, economics-based techniques to plan and manage software projects for maximum return on technology investments. The authors begin by dispelling widespread myths about software costs, explaining why traditional, “engineering-based” software management introduces unacceptable inefficiencies in today’s development environments. Next, they show business and technical managers how to combine the principles of economics and iterative development to achieve optimal results with limited resources. Using their techniques, readers will learn how to build systems that enable maximum business innovation and process improvement—and implement software processes that allow them to do so consistently. Highlights include How to repeatedly quantify the value a project is delivering and quickly adjust course as needed How to reduce software project size, complexity, and other “project killers” How to identify and eliminate software development processes that don’t work How to improve development processes, reduce rework, mitigate risk, and identify inefficiencies How to create more proficient teams by improving individual skills, team interactions, and organizational capability Where to use integrated, automated tools to improve effectiveness What to measure, and when: specific metrics for project inception, elaboration, construction, and transition The Economics of Iterative Software Development: Steering Toward Better Business Results will help both business and technical managers make better decisions throughout the software development process—and it will help team and project leaders keep any project or initiative on track, so they can deliver more value faster.

Steering Toward Better Business Results

The Economics of Iterative Software Development

Patricia Kong

Ryan Ripley

Todd Miller

Leverage Evidence-Based Management, a scientific method, to enable organizations to achieve goals under conditions of uncertainty. Organizations often believe in the certainty of their plans and see every deviation from the plan as a sign of failure. They view the organization as a machine for creating and executing plans instead of looking at it as a responsive organism, attentive to the changes in its environment. In a world of uncertainties, organizations need to be capable of reinventing themselves every day based on new information. In Unlocking Business Agility with Evidence-Based Management, authors Patricia Kong, Todd Miller, Kurt Bittner, and Ryan Ripley use the framework developed by Scrum.org called Evidence-Based Management (EBM). EBM is an empirical approach that helps organizations use experimentation and rapid feedback to progress toward goals. This path is not always obvious or straightforward, but that is a benefit: in a complex and changing world, the path toward goals will always be uncertain. EBM helps organizations use new data to adapt their plan toward their goals. Throughout the book, the authors present stories and experiences that illustrate how EBM can be applied to set better goals and then leverage empiricism to achieve those goals using feedback, learning, and evidence. This definitive guide will help your organization identify its true purpose, improve its ability to reach goals, and build a culture of trust, transparency, and growth. Clarify goals and demonstrate value, success, and progress using agile metrics Progress toward goals in uncertain and rapidly changing circumstances Embrace empiricism and experimentation to find solutions for complex problems Find real-world anonymized case studies on how to articulate goals and measurements in a way that fosters self-management and business agility Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Satisfy Customers and Improve Organizational Effectiveness

Unlocking Business Agility with Evidence-Based Management

Peter Götz

Uwe M. Schirmer

The Practical Guide to Optimizing Product Value through Better Teamwork with Scrum “Professional Scrum is hard, not because the ideas are hard, but because it requires persistence, focus, and dedication to not let the day-to-day realities get in the way. In this book, Peter, Uwe, and Kurt have provided a collection of materials to help the Scrum Team deliver value and feel happy doing it.” --Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org Teams and individuals find the rules of the Scrum Framework to be easy to describe but challenging to implement. The Professional Scrum Team helps you bring the Scrum Framework rules to life in your everyday work, optimizing both team and individual performance and creating more value. Three leading Scrum experts bring together proven practices based on decades of real-life experience participating in, leading, and supporting Scrum Teams. They introduce a team as it starts out with Scrum and follow it as it gains hard-won practical experience, gradually mastering the intense collaboration that Scrum demands. As you share the team's experience--facing and overcoming realistic challenges--you'll discover better ways to work together, enhance your practices, leverage tools, continuously improve, and deliver functionality in ever-shorter cycles. Understand how Scrum Teams work, collaborate, and promote transparency Explore common problems that lead less experienced Scrum Teams to give up Find your Scrum Team's best approach to solving complex adaptive problems Integrate DevOps practices with Scrum to improve effectiveness Productively and professionally resolve conflicts that arise from close collaboration Help your organization learn how to improve its results by better supporting its Scrum Teams This guide is for anyone who works with Scrum Teams or wants to become more effective as a Scrum Team member or leader. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

The Professional Scrum Team

Uwe Schirmer

The Scrum Framework comprises eleven rules based on empirical process control. These rules can easily be described and understood, but they can be extremely challenging for teams to implement. The Professional Scrum Team helps real-world teams bring Scrum rules to life in their everyday work. Leading Scrum.org consultants and trainers Peter G tz and Uwe M. Schirmer bring together proven practices based on their real-life experience working in (and with) real Scrum teams. They show how Scrum teams can optimize their performance as teams, and how each participant can work more successfully as a Scrum team member. The authors introduce a team as it starts out with Scrum, and follows that team as it gains experience and functions with increasing effectiveness. First, you'll watch the team discover that its legacy approach to developing complex software doesn't work, seek a better way, and discover Scrum. Next, you'll watch the team take its first steps with Scrum and gain hard-won practical experience. In Part II, you'll watch as it finds better ways to discuss and describe requirements to optimize stakeholder collaboration, so developers can create the right product. Then, in Part III, you'll turn to development team practices and agile tools, discovering ways to continually improve quality and deliver functionality in ever-shorter cycles.

The Practical, Start-to-Finish Guide to Planning and Leading Iterative Software Projects Iterative processes have gained widespread acceptance because they help software developers reduce risk and cost, manage change, improve productivity, and deliver more effective, timely solutions. But conventional project management techniques don’t work well in iterative projects, and newer iterative management techniques have been poorly documented. Managing Iterative Software Development Projects is the solution: a relentlessly practical guide to planning, organizing, estimating, staffing, and managing any iterative project, from start to finish. Leading iterative development experts Kurt Bittner and Ian Spence introduce a proven, scalable approach that improves both agility and control at the same time, satisfying the needs of developers, managers, and the business alike. Their techniques are easy to understand, and easy to use with any iterative methodology, from Rational Unified Process to Extreme Programming to the Microsoft Solutions Framework. Whatever your role–team leader, program manager, project manager, developer, sponsor, or user representative–this book will help you Understand the key drivers of success in iterative projects Leverage “time boxing” to define project lifecycles and measure results Use Unified Process phases to facilitate controlled iterative development Master core concepts of iterative project management, including layering and evolution Create project roadmaps, including release plans Discover key patterns of risk management, estimation, organization, and iteration planning Understand what must be controlled centrally, and what you can safely delegate Transition smoothly to iterative processes Scale iterative project management from the smallest to the largest projects Align software investments with the needs of the business Whether you are interested in software development using RUP, OpenUP, or other agile processes, this book will help you reduce the anxiety and cost associated with software improvement by providing an easy, non-intrusive path toward improved results–without overwhelming you and your team.

Managing Iterative Software Development Projects

Dave West

Today, organisations want to scale Scrum to ever larger and more complex projects, driving the benefits of agility throughout the enterprise. But most conventional solutions to scaling agility have added complexity and deviated from the principles that make Scrum so attractive. Scaling Scrum with Nexus introduces a better approach, reflecting the authors' many years of applying and scaling Scrum in multiple industries. Four leading Scrum.org experts introduce the Nexus Framework, showing how it enables smooth integration among multiple Scrum teams, as well as highly-effective collaboration with non-Scrum teams working on the same project. Drawing on their immense experience, they explain what Nexus is, how it works, and how it solves agile scalability problems that have bedeviled organisations for years. Next, they offer start-to-finish guidance for applying Nexus Framework principles throughout your own organisation. Readers will walk through forming a Nexus, organising work in a Nexus environment, managing and enabling a Nexus, and much more -- all that is needed to succeed with Scrum in even the most challenging global projects.

The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum

Eric Naiburg

Improve and Accelerate Software Delivery for Large, Distributed, Complex Projects The Nexus Framework is the simplest, most effective approach to applying Scrum at scale across multiple teams, sites, and time zones. Created by Scrum.org–the pioneering Scrum training and certification organization founded by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber–Nexus draws on decades of experience to address the unique challenges teams face in coming together, sharing work, and managing and minimizing dependencies. The Nexus™ Framework for Scaling Scrum is a concise book that shows how Nexus helps teams to deliver a complex, multi-platform, software-based product in short, frequent cycles, without sacrificing consistency or quality, and without adding unnecessary complexity or straying from Scrum’s core principles. Using an extended case study, the authors illustrate how Nexus helps teams solve common scaling challenges like reducing cross-team dependencies, preserving team self-organization and transparency, and ensuring accountability. Understand the challenges of delivering working, integrated product increments with multiple teams, and how Nexus addresses them Form a Nexus around a new or existing product and learn how that Nexus sets goals and plans its work Run Sprints within a Nexus, provide transparency into progress, conduct effective Nexus Sprint reviews, and use Nexus Sprint Retrospectives to continuously improve Overcome the distributed team collaboration challenges

Kurt Bittner

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