I’ve worked with a Kanban team for four years. I’ve recently come into a company that also uses a Kansan approach. I’ve come to suspect that a least one of the teams I work with could benefit from a more Scrum-like approach. So I thought I’d brush up on the basics. Who better, then, than Jeff Sutherland, inventor of Scrum to help with that.

This is, not surprisingly, one of the best introductions to Scrum I’ve read. It’s aimed at a general audience, rather than a technical one.

It’s a reasonably easy read. Sutherland tells the story of how and why he came up with Scrum. I love that he goes into the problems that he was trying to solve with each of the major features of Scrum. The stories are not only informative, but entertaining.

There is a bit of bluster to this book. Like many business books, this one claims to have the answer to all of your woes. That is not the case, but this book is still a good read.

This isn’t the only book, I’d read on Agile. Stellman and Greene’s Learning Agile gives a good overview. The Poppendieck’s Lean Software Development proposes a slightly different process that is also derived from the Toyota Production System. And The Machine That Changed the World covers the Toyota Production System and why it was so transformative.

Nevertheless, if you want an easy-to-read, but in depth introduction to Scrum, this is the book for you.