Lately I've been shifting focus back and forth between development and project management. 2 years ago I took the initiative to start Scrum where I work, and this has turned out to be such an interesting and demanding process that I'm having problems letting go (not that there is any reason to). During this process I've been reading a lot of books about Scrum, Agile, XP, planning, estimating and so on. All the books I've read has been very theoretical. Most of them were based on experience by very experienced practitioners, but still they tend to be very general in their advice and cautious of telling you how to do things.

Today I was looking at some Scrum resources over at ScrumAlliance and found a presentation by Henrik Kniberg called "The Manager's Role in Scrum" (access requires membership). In his presentation I saw a book he had written (Scrum and XP from the Trenches) and found it freely available at InfoQ. The interesting thing about this book (which I by the way have not read but just skimmed through) is that it focusing on "this is how we did it" on a very detailed level. The nice thing about these kinds of books (or even presentations) is that you might not agree with everything that they've done, but it gives you input like: "we've tried this and it worked!" or "we tried that, but it failed miserably!". And if you're lucky you also get "we think this worked for us because..." or "it did not work very well because..." and so on. You also often discover things that you haven't thought about before. "Ahhh... that's right, why haven't I thought of that?".

I've seen the same things at NNUG where we typically have two types of presentations; new technology, or someone's experience within a certain topic. New technology talks are very interesting and motivating, but often lack experience. Experience based talks are popular because everyone knows the value behind time spent and experience gained, and that this information is given to you for free, helping you do avoid common mistakes.

Hopefully I will get time to read Henriks book soon and maybe I'll post a short review as well.