Agile Software Development with SCRUM is written by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle. I read 'Agile Estimating and Planning' by Mike Cohn prior to this one but that's probably the wrong order. The Cohn book picks up where this book leaves off, it tells you how to actually do the stuff. Agile Software Development with SCRUM is the basis for the Cohn book.

Bad news first, the last half of this book really drags on. Honestly I think it's filler material. It basically covers why they think Scrum works from different esoteric view points. It just doesn't seem like useful information. Sprinkled in the end there are some example situations that might be useful for the reader.

The good news is that I am entirely sold on Scrum. It seems to be a very un-intrusive process. It makes a lot of sense and I hope to evangelize it as much as possible.

I'd sum up Scrum by saying that it focuses on doing the most important work first and it gives management and business owners a lot of visibility into the project.

To put Scrum into context, where XP is a set of low level practices for developers and teams, Scrum is some guidelines for managing and giving visibility to a project.

Agile Estimating and Planning is a better book, but Agile Software Development with SCRUM is required reading.

Agile Software Development with SCRUM