Key Principle: Start with Scrum

MORE EFFECTIVE TEAMS   The next five chapters—from this chapter, “More Effective Agile Beginnings: Scrum,” through “More Effective Individuals and Interactions”—describe issues related to individuals and how collections of individuals are combined into teams. This chapter describes the most common Agile team structure, Scrum. The other chapters discuss Agile teams in general, Agile team culture, geographically distributed teams, and the individual and interaction skills that support effective Agile work.

MORE EFFECTIVE WORK   If you’re more interested in specific work practices than team dynamics, skip to the chapters beginning with “More Effective Agile Projects” and ending with "More Effective Agile Delivery."

MORE EFFECTIVE ORGANIZATIONS   If you’re more interested in top leadership issues, skip to the chapters beginning with “More Effective Agile Leadership” and ending with “More Effective Agile Adoptions.”

The primary challenge in the software industry for the 35 years I’ve been working in it, and probably longer, has been avoiding “code-and-fix development”—writing code without forethought or planning and then debugging it until it works. This ineffective development mode results in teams spending more than half their effort correcting defects they created earlier (McConnell 2004).

In the 1980s and 1990s, developers would say they were doing structured ...