A good book on adaptive planning and agile estimation. Mike gives a comprehensive overview and guides you to improve the planning practices. It touches also on the usage of economic models to guide prioritisation. The book seems to be mainly aimed at teams working with scrum and XP. Some parts of the book seems dated already and many things have happened in the past 5 years in the agile community. It is, however, well worth reading

Найкраще з того, що бачив по Agile методологіях.
По суті є все, що необхідно для ознайомлення, організації agile підходу в командах і його вдосконалення.
Все зрозумілою мовою.

In this book you will find two descriptions of what is pretty much the "standard" agile estimation and planning process: the first one as a set of topic-focused chapters that you can read or refer your colleagues to as independent topics; the second is as a short story in the line of The Goal or The Phoenix Project, with less detail but more hollistic.

Apart form explaining the canon, Mike Cohn is referring to the why behind some of the practices (Parkinson's Law, queuing theory, research on what type of estimation tasks are naturally easier for humans...) and adding some touches from less common sources like the feature buffer derived from the MoSCoW model and schedule buffer from Goldratt's Critical Chain.

I think it's nice read for developers and team leaders with the only cons being that you might want to change the process at your work and find yourself unable for environement causes. But that's not Mike's fault!

This book was very well done. The last chapter of a case study brought it all together.

Fundamental tools and knowledge for a Scrum Master

This book contains great descriptions and examples of a range of agile estimation and planning tools - and it is a must-read for any Scrum Master.

Keep these tools in your toolbox, practice with your team as much as possible.

A word of caution: a Scrum team is self-managing, so they decide what tools and how they work. There are other ways that described in this book

Like many books on agile, much of this book's ideas and tips are only useful if you are using an agile process with sprints, small tasks, team sprint planning and other features of popular agile methodologies. If your team only uses some elements of agile or is using a lighter weight agile approach such as kanban, it is less useful.

Part 1: The Problem and the Goal

A good overview of the purpose of planning. I took away two points: the process of planning is more important than the plan itself, and a plan needs to be a living document if it is to remain useful throughout the project. As a consequence of these two principles, plans should not be laid out in detail from the beginning. Instead, plans should be as detailed as needed any any given time. For example, in a traditional agile flow, the next sprint will be broken down into tasks small enough to work on while future sprints may only have a rough sequencing of features planned.

Part 2: Estimating Size

Overall, I would recommend Software Estimation by Steve McConnell over this book. This section Cohn's book goes into a bit more depth on story points, ideal days, and planning poker than McConnell's book, but overall the content in Cohn's book is a subset of that in McConnell's book.

This book did give some interesting insights into re-estimating. Re-estimating has two purposes: to provide better estimates based on current data and to learn for future estimating. Inaccurate estimates and re-estimation should not be treated as failures. Individual estimates are rarely accurate, it's the aggregation that becomes more reliable. Another reason not to treat re-estimation as failure is that it discourages honest estimation in the future. Given these two purposes of re-estimation, it's rarely worth tracking how well individual estimates matched actual work done.

Part 3: Planning for Value

This part of the book covers figuring out what to do. The chapters on prioritization were useful. Since I am not in an environment where I have to directly worry about financial prioritization, I found most useful the discussion of estimating based on desirability.

In addition to the common knowledge that priority should depend on the "ratio" of desirability to effort, the book discusses how to assess desirability. ("Ratio" is in quotes since desirability is even harder to quantify than effort.) My key takeaway was that to decide how important something is, we should ask two questions: "how happy would you be with this feature?" and "how unhappy would you be without this feature?"

It might seem like these two questions would yield inverse answers, but consider a feature like saving in a text editor: if you just asked people how happy it would make them, it would likely get a middling score, but people would be very unhappy if their editor couldn't save. These are the features that are taken for granted, the things which would be deal breakers if you didn't add them. By only asking the first question, these features might be missed.

Part 4: Scheduling

Not particularly useful if you don't use an iteration based agile process.

Part 5: Tracking and Communicating

Also not so useful if you don't use an iteration based agile process.

Part 6: Why Agile Planning Works

A good summary of the book. Many of the highlights of the book can be gleaned from this one chapter section.

Part 7: A Case Study

Brought everything together nicely. It doesn't show how to deal with things going wrong, but since the purpose was to demonstrate the ideas to reinforce them, that is reasonable.

Солидная книжка про популярные ныне методологии разработки прожектов. В общем-то, про все рассказано, от внедрения до масштабирования, от планирования до реализации, даже с позитивными примерами в конце книги, где все слишком хорошо, но не скрывается, что это демонстрационная выдуманная ситуация. Если есть проблемы - нанимайте скрам-мастера :)
В целом, хорошая книга, что с приятно структурированными главами - и вступление, и резюме - годная для того, чтобы узнать и углубить.

Эта книга, безусловно, поменяла мое отношение к планированию. Ответила на многие вопросы, которые я до конца не мог сформулировать. Есть немного лишней информации, по разным бюрократическим а-ля отчетам. Но это все меркнет по сравнению с пользой от общего прочтения.

Полный обзор в моем блоге
https://nikitatim.medium.com/agile-%D...

Concise, clear, practical. Sometimes explaining obvious things too much. Also, really liked the last chapter with the case study.

This book focus on testing planning methods and cases that can be faced in Agile testing. You would learn how to make a good plan within a sort of time and get to know about some of the basic tools that can be used in Agile Development.

Amazing book, really really simple and it was actually fun reading it. Gives a very very clear perspective of what needs to be done. A must Read.

This book gives a very detailed look at how to use agile to plan releases and iterations.

If you're looking for a general overview of agile, or you are a developer who doesn't have to worry too much about release planning, this book might be a little overwhelming.

But if you're planning an agile project, and you need to know--or at least be aware--that there are options like feeding buffers and using the Kano model to help prioritize features, then this is the book for you.