Suggested Reading

There is a tremendous amount of information available on agile methodologies. Coaching various teams in different setups and working on a variety of different projects, we have frequently been asked for a short list of essential books for getting started.

The following list represents our current thinking of the most important books in order to get the basic things right. Keep in mind that just reading books will not make your team agile. There are experiences and insights that cannot be conveyed using documentation. Instead you should consider getting experienced consults as coaches for your team.

The list is ordered in the order we would recommend to study them.

Kent Beck: "Extreme Programming Explained". Why starting with this? Extreme Programming is the most popular agile methodology, so this is the book by the inventor.
Ken Schwaber, Mike Beedle: "Agile Software Development with Scrum". As soon as you get slightly beyond just your engineering team, you might be in need of some project management techniques. Scrum is well suited to frame XP, it's complementary, not a replacement.
Mike Cohn: "Agile Estimating and Planning". Every project sponsor will ask you a few very basic questions such as how much does it cost, and by when will it be done. Based on stories and other techniques this book will help you to find good answers. The book also contains descriptions of many pragmatic techniques, which are easy to apply. - Please also see our product Agile Auction, a free card game similar to poker that you can use for project planning and estimation.
Rick Mugridge, Ward Cunningham: "Fit for Developing Software - Framework for Integrated Tests". You have written your stories. Wouldn't it be nice, if both the stories and the acceptance tests would be stored closely together and the acceptance tests could be specified by your customer and could still be executed programmatically and automatically? Fit and Fitness provide a technique for exactly that purpose. Use this technique along with Eric Evans book on Domain Driven Design (see below).
Eric Evans: "Domain Driven Design". An excellent companion to Fit based development (see above). Eric takes you through the steps needed to get your domain model sorted out. Despite emerging architecture and design this is still a crucial activity of software engineering.
Jeffrey K. Liker: "The Toyota Way". This book is a superb overview of Toyota's way of designing and manufacturing cars. The values and principles are extremely similar to those of agile software development. We learned a lot from Toyota.
Jeffrey K. Liker and David Meier: "The Toyota Way Fieldbook". This is the companion book with an emphasis on how to put to work the principles that underly Toyota's philosophy. Again a book with excellent value.
Mary and Tom Poppendieck: "Implementing Lean Software Development - From Concept to Cash". We just love this book! Yet another book with lots of practical advice. Make sure you read the "Try This" sections at the end of each chapter.

If you disagree with this list or if you think there's other books that should be listed, please contact us.