Appendix B. Continued Reading

Following is a list of resources that I have found helpful in my own work with Agile practices and principles. As a rule, my advice for those seeking to learn more about Agile is to read everything you can, including (or especially) anything that seems to run contrary to your current understanding. I find it helpful to think of books and articles about Agile not as competing versions of the “correct” approach, but rather as road-tested insights shared by generous practitioners who want to give something back to the Agile movement at large. Approaching any and all writing about Agile in this way allows us to be less defensive, less reductive, and more open to discovering new ideas and approaches that can help make us better practitioners and leaders.

12 Principles of Agile Software

Aside from the four high-level values captured in the Agile Manifesto, the 17 software developers gathered at Snowbird also wrote 12 principles to guide Agile software developers. These continue the Manifesto’s overall themes of customer centricity and responding to change, and constitute another great resource for folks looking to better understand the principles and values of the Agile movement.

The Scrum Field Guide: Agile Advice for Your First Year and Beyond by Mitch Lacey (Addison-Wesley Professional)

I found this book to be particularly helpful during my initial exploration of Agile practices and frameworks. It does a great job explaining the real-world challenges that you are likely to face when bringing Scrum, or any set of Agile practices, to your team.

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (4th Estate)

Bad Science is not a book about Agile at all—it is a book about quackery and the irresponsible journalistic practices that enable it. But there is one concept in this book that I have found very helpful in navigating the world of Agile: “the proprietization of common sense.” Goldacre describes this concept as follows:

You can take a perfectly sensible intervention, like, a glass of water and an exercise break, but add nonsense, make it sound more technical, and make yourself sound clever. This will enhance the placebo effect, but you might also wonder whether the primary goal is something more cynical and lucrative: to make common sense copyrightable, unique, and owned.

I find it helpful to think about “the proprietization of common sense” whenever I encounter an Agile practice or methodology that feels too complex or proprietary. The underlying values of Agile and the most basic implementation of those values are, in many ways, common sense. This does not make them any less powerful or relevant—and certainly does not mean that we should dress them up in opaque and proprietary jargon until they feel sufficiently complicated and “different.”

Good to Great by Jim Collins (Harper-Collins)

Another book that is not technically about Agile, Good to Great does an amazing job describing the kind of leadership that drives certain businesses to outperform the market at large. This is a great example of how the underlying values of Agile tend to show up in many situations where businesses find success, even when they are not knowingly following these values or implementing formalized Agile practices. (Collins’s article of the same name also provides a great, accessible overview of the research included behind the book.)

Head First Agile by Jennifer Greene and Andrew Stellman (O’Reilly)

This book provides a wealth of actionable information about Agile practices and frameworks including Scrum, XP, and Kanban, and does so in a highly visual and deeply engaging style. If you’re looking to learn more about specific Agile frameworks and methodologies or are interested in taking the PMI-ACP® exam to become an Agile Certified Practitioner, this is a great place to start.

The Human Side of Agile by Gil Broza (3P Vantage Media)

This book does a great job describing the qualities and behaviors that drive successful Agile practitioners and leaders. Broza’s approach encourages teams and individuals to look beyond “magic bullet” thinking and understand the personal commitment that really goes into embracing Agile principles and values.

The Age of Agile by Stephen Denning (AMACOM)

This book lays out the appeal of Agile in terms that will make sense to leaders from any kind of business. My very favorite part of the book is the chapter in which Denning addresses the “Trap of Shareholder Value,” an all-too-common impediment to organizations behaving in a way that truly reflects the best interests of their employees and their customers.

The Four by Scott Galloway (Portfolio/Penguin)

This book provides a much-needed counterpoint to the near-ubiquitous belief that companies can become more innovative and more successful by emulating today’s biggest technology companies. At its heart, this book makes the argument that no matter how innovative your origins, you don’t become one of the biggest companies in the world by challenging “business as usual” so much as by perfecting business as usual.

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff and J.J. Sutherland (Crown Business)

While I still feel like the promise made by this book’s title can be easily misinterpreted, it is thrilling to read about the founding ideas and broad applicability of Scrum from one of the people who created it. If you’re looking to better understand how and why a set of practices can come together to create a cohesive and thoughtful way of working, this makes for a great read.