New Book: Professional Scrum with Team Foundation Server 2010

Are you using Team Foundation Server, or are you considering it?
Are you practicing Scrum-based software development (or do you want to learn how to)?

If the answer is YES to these questions then I can’t say enough good things about this book. Professional Scrum with Team Foundation Server 2010 will provide you with everything you need to know about Team Foundation Server 2010 to really unlock the power of using it for Scrum-based software development. Team Foundation Server 2010 is especially suited to this goal since it was built with such tooling in mind, such as the ability to decompose larger workstreams into smaller child tasks, to manage a common backlog of work and break this down into iterations/sprints, to calculate the capacity of your team and of individuals, and to generate burndowns and other interesting reports in real time.

I’m personally a huge fan of Scrum. I even had the pleasure of spending the day with Ken Schwaber last week (one of the two co-developers of scrum) and we spent the day talking about Scrum, its origins, and where it’s headed. I think that the real popularity of Scrum stems from its simplicity. In order for everybody on a team to work better together, they have to first be able to understand the process whereby everybody is going to work together towards a common goal; unless everybody can understand what the process is and what the common goal is, how can you work together? Scrum addresses this issue head-on by using simple, fun terminology and clearly-defined communications channels and methods that everybody on a team can easily understand.

But you don’t have to take my word for it… I’d suggest adding this book to your backlog.