Recently Mike Cottmeyer recommended a list of books for traditional project managers and new teams trying to make a move towards Agile. He listed the following books, along with a short reason for adding them to the list
- Extreme Programming Explained - Kent Beck - The practices behind XP are the the secret sauce that makes all the agile project management and leadership stuff really hum.
- Managing Agile Projects with Scrum - Ken Schwaber - Does a great job explaining the project management side of Scrum and is a great resource for someone just getting their feet wet with agile.
- Agile Estimating and Planning - Mike Cohn - If you understand the fundamentals and want to put planning structure around agile, read this book.
- User Stories Applied - Mike Cohn - Understanding how to write requirements as functional threads valuable to a customer is hard... this book helps you do it better.
- Agile Software Development - Alistair Cockburn – A must read for the advanced Agile practitioner. It describes software development as a cooperative game... similar to musicians improvising on stage.
- Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility - Michele Sliger and Stacia Broderick – Maps processes behind PMP to Agile. Must read for the PMP trying to manage an agile project.
- Scaling Lean & Agile Development - Bas Vodde and Craig Larman - Provides a valid perspecitve on how to scale agile to the enterprise.
- Scaling Software Agility - Dean Leffingwell - Adequately addresses dealing with agile at scale in a complex enterprise.
- Managing Iterative Software Development Projects - Kurt Bittner and Ian Spence – More on RUP but does a solid job of explaining iterative and incremental software project management.
Most of the books on this list are also present on the “Top 20 Agile Development Books, Ever” prepared by Jurgen Appelo. Jurgen used the following approach for coming up with the list
- Number of Amazon reviews,
- Average Amazon rating,
- Number of Google hits and
- Jolt awards.
A few books from Jurgen’s list include
- Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns and Practices - Robert C. Martin
- Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code - Martin Fowler
- The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master - Andrew Hunt, David Thomas
- Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit - Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck
- Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams - Alistair Cockburn
- Test Driven Development: By Example - Kent Beck
Agile Tortoise also recommended a series of Agile books and categorized them on the basis of
- Agile Project Management
- Project Requirements, Estimation and Planning
- Development
- Continuous Process Improvements
Ryan Cooper, suggested his list of 10 Must-Read books for people already doing Agile development and others who are curious to learn Agile but are still skeptical. Apart from the books already mentioned above, Ryan mentioned a list of books which deal with people, communication and risk management. His list included
- The Goal - Eliyahu Goldratt
- Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas - Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising
- Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects - Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
- Crucial Conversations - Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler
- Peopleware - Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister