3 Books every scrum master should read

Some cracking suggestions to start your bookshelf

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Having built up several shelves in my bookcase with technical books over the years as I was sorting them out I thought it would be interesting to arrange them by job role and task. I had several books discussing scrum and thought these few books would be a good starter for anyone new to the role or looking to become a scrum master.

I came up with these three as they are more heavily worn than the others and are very different from each other so have specific purposes.

• The Agile Samurai -This is a solid textbook on the subject of agile, so covers the broad subject of Agile. The text is regularly interspersed with diagrams and pictures, and the overall style is very easy to read.
• Fixing Your Scrum — This book covers what it says on the cover, some real-world experience boiled down into a good set of tips and advice.
• Agile project management and scrum v2 — this is a real pocketbook so easy to have in your bag or desk drawer. I regularly buy a stack of these and give them to people or new starters on the team. It is small, easy to read, and covers both scrum and project management, which a scrum master needs to be an expert in both.
• The other obvious omission from the list is the scrum guide itself, which was revised in 2020 and is available to download for free. This is such an essential I left it off my list as I am taking it for granted you already have a copy.

So the relationship I see between these books can be summarised as:

The Agile Samurai

How agile masters deliver great software by Jonathan Rasmusson, ISBN 978–1934356586, 268 pages, published 2017. Find book on Amazon.

Covers all the basics — agile, inception, planning, and execution. However, it also includes information on other key areas that sometimes get left out — refactoring, unit testing, technical debt, TDD, continuous integration.

A comprehensive book and not a heavy read as the lighter tone and interesting…