Books to Read

On-going continuous learning . Once you start on Agile there is no end of learning! See Webinars and Videos for video version of this.

"Thinking in Bets" - Annie Duke

• "Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development" - James O. Coplien and Gertrud Bjørnvig

• "More Agile Tesing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team" - Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory
• "Badass Making Users Awesome" - Kathy Sierra
• "Driving Fear Out of the Workplace: Creating the High-Trust, High-Performance Organization" by Kathleen D. Ryan and Daniel K. Oestreich
• "Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change" - William B. Joiner, Stephen A. Josephs (recommended by Robbie)
• "The IT Consultant : A Commonsense Framework for Managing the Client Relationship" - Rick Freedman
• "The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals" - Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, Jim Huling
• "An Introduction to General Systems Thinking" - Gerald Weinberg
• "The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations" - Robert Cross and Andrew Parker
• "The New Why Teams Don't Work: What Goes Wrong and How to Make It Right" - Harvey Robbins
• "Out of Crisis" - W Edwards Deming
• "Beyond Legacy Code" - Dave Bernstein
• "Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World" - Brian Walker
• "Python Projects" - Laura Cassell
• "Diffusion of Innovations" - Everett Rogers
• "The Power of Habit" - Charles Duhigg
• "Managing for Excellence" - David Bradford and Allen Cohen
• “Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness” - Frederic Laloux, Ken Wilber
• "Managing to Learn: Using the A3 Management Process" - John Shook
• Positivity – Barbara Fredrickson
• Kanban in Action - Marcus Hammarberg & Joakim Sundén. Note: Not available on Kindle at the moment.

I decided to take a more disciplined approach to tracking reading and learning when I started my company Focussed Agile LLC. This list is the result of this approach:

• 2017-03-20: Accelerate - Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World - John P Kotter
• 2017-02-09: "The Rollout: A Novel about Leadership and Building a Lean-Agile Enterprise with SAFe" by Alex Yakyma
• 2017-01-20: "Learning Agile: Understanding Scrum, XP, Lean, and Kanban" - Andrew Stellman, Jennifer Greene
• 2016-11-18: "Rolling Rocks Downhill: The Agile Business Novel" - Clarks Ching
• 2016-11-08: "Scrum Guide" - Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland
• 2016-10-21: "This is Lean - Resolving the Efficiency Paradox" - Niklas Modig
• 2016-10-10: "Implementing Beyond Budgeting: Unlocking the Performance Potential" - Bjarte Bogsnes
• 2016-06-06: Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age - Roman Pichler
• 2016-05-05: "Management 3.0" - Jurgen Appelo
• 2016-05-01: "Conflict Resolution" - Daniel Dana
• 2016-04-21: "Superforecasting - The Art and Science of Prediction" - Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner
• 2016-04-02: "Designing Organizations - Strategy, Structure, and Process at the Business Unit and Enterprise Levels" - Jay R. Galbraith
• 2016-03-29: "Bridging the Communication Gap: Specification by Example and Agile Acceptance Testing" - Gojko Adzic
• 2016-03-17: "Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects" - Johanna Rothman
• 2016-01-05: "Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World" - General Stanley McChrystal.
• 2015-12-30: "Lean Product and Process Development" - Allen Ward. Excellent book - recommended - on the application of lean ideas to product development process.
• 2015-12-17: "Agile Extension to the BABOK Guide" - IIBA
• 2015-11-30: "Getting Value Out of Agile Retrospectives" - Luis Conclaves and Ben Linders
• 2015-10-21: "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" - Patrick Lencioni
• 2015-10-14: "Complexity - A Very Short Introduction" - John Holland. The basis of Scrum is complex systems. This book gives a pretty good introduction to the understanding of complex systems in general. Not directly useful perhaps, but helps provide a framework for thinking.
• 2015-10-07: “The Lean Machine- How Harley-Davidson Drove Top-Line Growth and Profitability with Revolutionary Lean Product Development” - Dantar P. Oosterwal Brilliant book, just brilliant, if you are trying to understand how to implement “lean” type thinking approach to the problem of new product development.
• 2015-10-06: "Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability" - Daniel S. Vacant. There are two uses of this book 1) to understand a small set of metrics which, if tracked correctly, will help you improve your process and 2) to understand how to interpret scatterplots, cumulative flow diagrams and so on, what to look for and how to address. Book is a little “anti-Scrum” (or rather anti point based estimating) but still a valuable addition to understanding your delivery system.
• 2015-09-30: "Scaling Lean and Agile Development: Thinking and Organization Tools" - Craig Larmon and Bas Vodde. This books looks at the process of scaling more from the viewpoint of the original Scrum thinking, that of complexity science. It doesn't specify a lot of practices, by rather suggest experiments with sections labelled “try”.
• 2015-09-22: "User Story Mapping" - Jeff Patton. Excellent book on the process of working requirements. Tool offers not only a way to define the stories in the first place, but also how to put together a roadmap, use the story map as a way of showing progress and maintaining context.
• 2015-08-13: “Introduction to Disciplined Agile Delivery" - Scott Ambler, Mark Lines: Another approach to adaptation. Like the focus on risk, although positioning as “something Scrum doesn't worry about” I think is incorrect - we did after all.
• 2015-08-12: "Secrets of Consulting" - Gerry Weinberg: Useful for a new consulting business like me.
• 2015-08-08: “Predicting the Unpredictable” - Johanna Rothman: Great summary of estimation and planning approaches
• 2015-08-06: “Scrum for the Rest of Us” - Brian Rabon: Scrum 101.

Been reading for a lot of years so this is a partial list of books completed. And recommended reading is a list of specific books I thought were useful.

• "Leading Change" - John P Kotter
• "Squirrel Inc: A Fable of Leadership" - Stephen Denning
• "The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development" - Don Reinertsen
• "The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement" - Eli Goldratt.
• "Critical Chain" - Eli Goldratt
• "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" - Patrick Lencioni. One of those business “fable” books. Easy read. Good lessons. Building trust.
• "Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit" - Mary and Tom Poppendieck
• "Implementing Lean Software Development" - Mary Poppendieck
• "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us" - Dan Pink
• "Cultivating Communities of Practice" - Etienne Wenger
• "Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide" - Kenneth Rubin. Probably the best book on how ensuring your team(s) are successful using the basic Scrum framework.
• "Crystal Clear: A Human Powered Methodology for Small Teams" - Alistair Cockburn. Coaching 101 - good stuff.
• "Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams" - Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory. Best book to get you started on the agile approach to testing.
• "Joy, Inc: How We Built a Workplace People Love" - Richard Sheridan. Great book showing the application of an agile approach into a real workplace.
• "Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard" - Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Offers understanding of how to facilitate change. An antidote to the view that “change is hard”. Reality is that change is hard only if people don't want to change.
• "Agile Product Management with Scrum" - Roman Pichler. Great book on being a product owner.
• "Agile Software Requirements" - Dean Leffingwell. Actually not really a book about requirements. More a view of how to develop systems at scale using an agile approach with heavy lean thinking influence.
• "Agile Estimating and Planning" by Mike Cohn. The canonical reference for the basics of estimating using an agile approach, especially applicable at the the team and team of teams level.
• "Crossing the Chasm" by Geoffrey Moore. Canonical book on product marketing, talks about concepts like the “elevator pitch” and “the product adoption life cycle which begins with innovators and moves to early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards - there is a vast chasm between the early adopters and the early majority”.
• "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency" by Tom DeMarco. Discussion about the counterintuitive principle that explains why efficiency efforts can slow a company down. Fights against the concept that, for example, 100% utilization of people is the most efficient way to get something done.
• The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses - Eric Ries. Great book! Applies agile / lean approach to the idea of working (and importantly) measuring progress on a true innovation by measuring true learning. While written from the perspective of a startup, the approach can be applied to any innovative endeavor. If you want to understand how to do real innovation and know whether you are making progress, this is the book for you. Key idea is the concept of “validated learning” where you set up experiments based on what you want to find out, and as a result of the feedback generated, make adjustments to your plan.
• The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim. The Goal is about manufacturing. Today, our constraints aren't robots inside our factories, but it's how we manage technologies. This book shows us how to diminish our modern constraints to help the business win and is useful for anyone wanting to transform their IT.

• Agile Coaching Resources: By Lyssa Adkins provides a view of recommended books (and other resources) aimed at improving you ability to coach.
• SAFe's Recommended Reading list: Aimed mainly at leadership.
• Switch Reading List: By the Heath brothers that wrote the book on organizational change called “Switch”.