Not long ago, on the last day of 2020, I wrote a review of the book Kanban and Scrum — Making the Most of Both, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in implementing Agile methodologies. However, this book was not the first by the author, Henrik Kniberg. His first book, published in 2007, also drew on his personal experience with agile methodologies and was titled Scrum and XP from the Trenches. Kniberg himself admits that he wrote this relatively short book over a single weekend, when he felt a strong urge to share his experiences with others.
This time, I won’t delve into the specifics of agile methodologies or why I’m singling out Kniberg’s books in particular, as I covered that in my previous review. Instead, I’ll briefly describe the book itself.
It’s also a very concise account of how he and his teams implemented various practices from Scrum and Extreme Programming in their work, with concrete examples and specific descriptions of the pros and cons. He’s not afraid to admit mistakes and point out what can go wrong. This is quite normal for agile methodologies, where much is governed by the motto “experiment and see what works best for your specific team.” The key is to frequently evaluate what’s been done (unlike older methodologies, where you might work for a year only to realize that you’ve been doing it wrong all along).
If in his next book Kniberg focused more on Kanban (while comparing it to Scrum), here there’s a sort of comparison between Scrum and XP, but with a deeper dive into the specifics of implementing Scrum with some elements of XP.
To jump ahead, I’ll say right away that I highly recommend reading this book, but make sure to get the revised 2015 edition rather than the original 2007 edition (luckily, it’s freely available on the InfoQ website). Overall, it’s essentially the same book but with the author’s commentary sprinkled throughout, where he critiques some of his own ideas (“how young and naive I was, and how wrong I was”) or, on the contrary, affirms them. It’s a look back at his own experience, now informed by eight additional years of practice.
If you compare this book to his second, they’re quite different in structure. In this one, Henrik goes into detail on practically every step of the team’s workflow, from forming the product backlog to each step along the way—preparing for sprint planning, communication, daily stand-ups, presenting results, and retrospectives.
He then describes how they combine Scrum with Extreme Programming, incorporating testing phases into the process, followed by a fairly substantial chapter on “Scrum of Scrums”—how to organize and coordinate the work of multiple Scrum teams. (To be honest, I started the book with this chapter and only afterward read it from the beginning.)
So overall, this book is more detailed than the second, yet it maintains a focus on essential elements without the verbosity and repetition that tends to weigh down much Western business literature.
As I mentioned, I recommend reading this book as well. Some sections can be taken as direct “how-to” instructions. Others simply demonstrate which approaches can be applied, what works and what doesn’t, and which practices thrive best. It’s a highly useful book from a practical standpoint.
My rating: 4.5/5
 | Henrik Kniberg “Scrum and XP from the Trenches – 2nd Edition” (free) | download |
 | Henrik Kniberg “Scrum and XP from the Trenches – 2nd Edition” | buy |
