📚 The Agile Library

[#1]

Just before I really go on vacation, I was asking myself the question what I would really want to looking for in a focus group in Community. Apart from the many likeminded people I could connect and discuss with, ask questions to or learn from, it would have to be useful links and resources to the domain.

As I usually do some reading during the holiday season, I would like to make a start in this Agile focus group to dive into inspirational Agile books. The kind of stuff that you should (have) read when you are working in an agile environment or would strongly recommend.

So I thought I'd start by sharing 2 books from my own Agile library that I have read and still refer to very commonly in my day-to-day work.

🪽 The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford is a novel on DevOps. While that in itself is an interesting given and there may be some debate on the quality of the novel, it does have some really interesting takes I regularly refer to with every customer I have worked with since I read the book. It offers a clear definition on the different types of work you can find at every company - nicely splitting it into planned and unplanned work. And it discusses the importance of discovering the bottlenecks in your team, your systems and your work. It cannot be stressed enough how devastating the impact of those can be on the overall flow across your organisation.

The principles of the book are also useful to map some of the tools from Atlassian's Swiss army knife we now call the System of Work to the right types of work. Unplanned work can best be captured and organised in a tool like Jira Service Management, while planned work would benefit more from Jira's planning capabilities like timelines and boards - obviously just lightly scratching the surface there ...

🏎️ Drive by Daniel Pink is more about the people. When you work, coach or walk along an agile team, getting to grips with how autonomy, mastery and purpose help us be the best version of ourselves is really valuable and powerful stuff. On many occasions, I like to d(r)ive into these principles when I get the chance to work with and untangle the challenges of teams that want to improve their outcomes and cohesiveness.

I am very curious to learn what agile literature is in your library. What book do you think should be on the must read list of any agile practitioner and why?

👀 Can't wait to see what I should d(r)ive into next (pun intended) or put on the reading list! Thanks for sharing!

[Walter Buggenhout]

Something very strange happened when I published the article 😅 - currently trying to fix this ...

[Walter Buggenhout]

... and, fixed! It is apparently not the greatest idea to add 2 images on a single line when writing an article. The editor does not know what to do with it very well and seems to become a really big fan of The Phoenix Project too at that point 😅

[Carolyn McNicoll]

The Phoenix Project is an excellent book!

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Walter Buggenhout 

I have read many agility-related, engineering practice, and team-supporting books and internet articles over the years: good, bad, and ugly :^)

Here is a starter list, ordered by author, which spans quite a bit of ground on this topic to support agile teams.  I only included books, not articles or online sources, and did not include language-specific engineering ones for agile teams.

• Specification by Example: How successful teams deliver the right software, by Gojko Adzic
• Coaching Agile Teams, by Lyssa Adkins
• Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business, by David Anderson
• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, by Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres
• Facilitating with Ease!: Core Skills for Facilitators, Team Leaders and Members, Managers, Consultants, and Trainers, by Ingrid Bens
• Advanced Facilitation Strategies: Tools and Techniques to Master Difficult Situations, by Ingrid Bens
• Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game, by Alistair Cockburn
• Agile Estimating and Planning, by Mike Cohn
• Succeeding with Agile, by Mike Cohn
• User Stories Applied, by Mike Cohn
• Agile Coaching, by Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley
• Out of the Crisis, by W. Edwards Deming
• Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code, by Michael Feathers
• The Lean Six Sigma Pocket Toolbook, by Michael L. George, et al.  (Aside: definitely more of a reference one than a read-straight-through one.)
• The Goal, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
• Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers, by Dave Gray, et al.
• The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master, by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
• Pragmatic Thinking & Learning: Refactor Your Wetware: by Andy Hunt
• The Nature of Software Development: Keep It Simple, Make It Valuable, Build It Piece by Piece, by Ron Jeffries
• The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, by Gene Kim, et al.
• The DevOps Handbook, Second Edition: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations, by Gene Kim, et al.
• The Unicorn Project: A Novel About Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data, by Gene Kim, et al.
• Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews, by Norman L. Kerth
• Agile Leadership Toolkit: Learning to Thrive with Self-managing Teams, by Peter Koning
• The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation, by Henri Lipmanowicz, Keith McCandless
• Liftoff: Launching Agile Projects & Teams, by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies
• User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product, by Jeff Patton and Peter Economy
• Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, by Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck
• The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development, by Donald G. Reinertsen
• Complete Systems Analysis, by James Robertsen and Suzanne Robertsen (Aside: to learn product analysis methods rarely covered in newer sources.)
• The Workshop Book: from Individual Creativity to Group Action, by R. Brian Stanfield
• The Art of Focused Conversation, by R. Brian Stanfield
• Managing Software Debt: Building for Inevitable Change, by Chris Sterling
• The Systems Thinking Playbook: Exercises to Stretch and Build Learning and Systems Thinking Capabilities, by Linda Booth Sweeney and Dennis Meadows.  (Aside: a vast number of coaching sources directly use material from this one without credit.)
• Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders, by Jean Tabaka
• Actionable Agile Metrics For Predictability: An Introduction, by Daniel Vacanti

Enjoy!

Kind regards,
Bill

[Walter Buggenhout]

Wow, @Bill Sheboy - Goodness me 🤩🤯😍 ... That is truly a library in itself. Quite a few on there that ring a bell or two 🛎️🛎️ ...

Glad that it's only a starter list 😉. Any favourites in particular from that list?

[Bill Sheboy]

@Walter Buggenhout -- I feel context helps regarding my favorites, such as "helping..."

• Teams get started
  • Liftoff: Launching Agile Projects & Teams
• Product people organize work
  • User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product
• Team coaches improve retrospective effectiveness
  • Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great
• Team leaders better support agile teams
  • Agile Leadership Toolkit: Learning to Thrive with Self-managing Teams
• Senior leaders understand agility (with pictures :^)
  • The Nature of Software Development: Keep It Simple, Make It Valuable, Build It Piece by Piece
• Leaders understand why, what, and how to measure
  • Actionable Agile Metrics For Predictability: An Introduction
• Leaders dive deeper to improve team flow
  • The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development
• People mentored / new to teams supercharge their learning skills
  • Pragmatic Thinking & Learning: Refactor Your Wetware

[Jennifer Harden]

The Phoenix Project is fabulous.  The follow up, The Unicorn Project, is also a great format for delivering useful information with the readability of a story.