Utter Rubbish & Waste of Time

Any additional comments?

I'm just over an hour and a half in and am massively disappointed by this book so far; so much so that I've been motivated to write a review before I get my credit refunded.

I'm a software engineer and was hoping to learn some useful and "official" scrum knowledge. So far, actual useful scrum related content must be only around a minute's worth, with the remainder being bragging ("I flew military planes", "do martial arts", "saved the FBI with IT", "my son is a war correspondent" kind of thing). This is unforgivable for a book who's title makes claims about doing twice the work in half the time.

If you've worked in software development for any length of time, you've likely come across the blaggers - people who are really good at talking, but very poor at doing. They point out problems at length, trying to make out like they are intelligent. Some fools fall for this, but any idiot can point out faults. It takes someone with intelligence to come up with solutions. After an hour and a half, all I've heard has been very light on useful information, but chock full of pointless anecdote after anecdote. At let's not forget the narcism - must be tough when you're so starved of praise that you have to write a book telling the whole world how great you are.

When some "facts" are introduced, they are very dubious. Take, for instance, the discussion about variation in developer productivity, which can apparently vary by up to as much as a factor of 10 for someone to produce a similar deliverable. Contrary to this, my own experience of development and others' work is that people who produce solutions faster do so at the cost of quality (I'm trying to remember where I've read things to back this up, perhaps it was in the excellent Code Complete by Steve McConnell). Then the author goes on to say that other studies have found that variation in team productivity can be much greater than a factor of 10, making the claim that something that took one team 1 week to do took some teams up to 2000 weeks to do. Wow, great statistic to quote to your boss, right? Better sort out our team, yes? Except for, if you think about it, that's over 38 years it took this other team to complete a task that one team could do in a week. This team must have been made up of very persistent people with severe learning difficulties. And I'd also like to know which team actually kept on with the same task for over 38 years. The problem is that this will now become a "fact" because it's been published in a book and people will listen to it and absorb it without question.

Another thing that was mentioned was how great it was to tear down cubicles to make way for an open plan office. This is stupid - study after study has shown that people with their own office, especially developers, are more productive. The reason is obvious and simple: software development is a thinking discipline and when you're in a noisy office with people interrupting you with questions whenever they feel like it doesn't help. You should convert the cubicles to real offices, not tear them down!

I'm going to finish this review by saying that the author is a fool. Even if this book is amazing from chapter 5 onwards, I've had enough of my time wasted by a narcissist who I never, ever want the misfortune of working with that I won't bother continuing. How this book has gotten so many good reviews, I'll never know.

35 people found this helpful

Definitely good, but alot of premise

I have experience with scrum in the past, and I downloaded this to give me a refresher. premise helps definitely helps beginners. But if your more advanced wanting a reminder of key aspects the last chapter is a summary of everything, with directions to chapters which address the certain topics

3 people found this helpful

story of scrum

the whole book is more about telling stories how great the scrum is rather than explaining principles, processes and steps to implement

2 people found this helpful

Great story telling.

I read an inflamatory review of this book telling that it is too self indulging. At times it feels like the scrum will solve world hunger, find a cure for all diseases and make every human clever. But in general this book is full of examples why scrum works and why when done properly it will make your job more enjoyable. JJ Sutherland narrating is great and the supporting stories very engaging.

2 people found this helpful

Feels like a sales pitch instead of advice

My experience with audio books about scrum is that they exists somewhere on a spectrum from anecdotal stories clearly designed to sell you scrum (the bad side of the specrum) to instructive and specific guides on how to implement scrum efficiently (the good side of the specturm). Unfortunetly this book exists completely on the bad side. if you are a beginner to scrum then it might be advisable to read this to get some very basic concepts, however you won't find anything in this book that you wont find in others. This book consists of "I went to a company and increased efficiency 1000% and cured the CEOs asthma because I used scrum" repackaged into different stories. Useful to sell you the idea of scrum (the author owns a scrum consultancy business so obviously that's what he wants to do) but useless in helping you overcome the challenges of implementing scrum.

1 person found this helpful

good book, but take with a pinch of salt.

whist this is a good book, the author has added a big dollop of his ego... you can't have that if your going to be a good Scrum Master.

1 person found this helpful

very well explained and easy to understand

Very well explained and easy to understand. The real world case studies of how Scrum has changed the way people work to acheive objectives is facinating.

1 person found this helpful

Don't bother. Not really a Scrum or Agile book

Should have been called "Jeff Sutherland Saves the World". It's not a book about Agile or Scrum except very tangentially.

Jeff Sutherland waxes lyrical about how amazing he is and incidentally mentions Scrum. Utter waste of my time.

If you're interested in a self-serving, Jeff Sutherland autobiography however, this will be right up your street.

Read how Sutherland single-handedly wins the Vietnam war whilst simultaneously curing cancer and inventing the ATM.

Give him a cookie and pat him on the head but don't buy his book would be my advice.

Inspirational learning

This book totally deserves its reputation. Inspirational, insightful, entertaining and relevant, it gives me new ideas each time I listen to it.

Great base for a solid understanding of scrum

Very informative and easy to follow. Narrator made a big difference. The book doesn't go very much in to depth about how things are done but instead explains why they are done a certain way and why that's important. A good use of examples that also show both sides makes this book seem very objective while a casual sense of humour makes it very easy to emphasize with the main theme.