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rlesias's review against another edition
4.0
Almost perfect. The part on user stories could have been more detailed.
willia4's review against another edition
3.0
We've been using Scrum at work for several years now -- and we've had a lot of success with it. But recently, the team I'm on has started to notice that (for various and unnecessary reasons), our workload is not as amenable to Scrum as it used to be. So we're starting to talk about looking for something else and Kanban is the most obvious starting point.
Skimming Wikipedia had given me a rough idea of what Kanban was, but this book filled in the details in a breezy, entertaining, and enjoyable-to-read fashion. It uses comic illustrations and interactions between a fictional team who's trying out Kanban to highlight the sort of situations that come up when using Kanban and how to deal with them.
In particular, this book heavily emphasizes the idea that Kanban isn't a system or process so much as it is a set of principles and rough guidelines. Because it's not itself a process, you can implement Kanban on top of whatever process you're currently using -- something I've not managed to glean before.
My one criticism of this book as that all of the examples are far too neat. In the real world, I'd expect you to run into far more gray areas that aren't handled quite as easily the ones the book's imaginary team faces. In particular, I'd have liked to see some examples for adding Kanban to an existing Scrum workflow -- the authors point out that this is possible several times, but never really get into what that means. Too often, they just shrug their shoulders and say "It depends".
I guess that's what consultants are for. But if you'd rather do some reading instead of (or before) paying those consultants, this book is probably not bad place to start!
Skimming Wikipedia had given me a rough idea of what Kanban was, but this book filled in the details in a breezy, entertaining, and enjoyable-to-read fashion. It uses comic illustrations and interactions between a fictional team who's trying out Kanban to highlight the sort of situations that come up when using Kanban and how to deal with them.
In particular, this book heavily emphasizes the idea that Kanban isn't a system or process so much as it is a set of principles and rough guidelines. Because it's not itself a process, you can implement Kanban on top of whatever process you're currently using -- something I've not managed to glean before.
My one criticism of this book as that all of the examples are far too neat. In the real world, I'd expect you to run into far more gray areas that aren't handled quite as easily the ones the book's imaginary team faces. In particular, I'd have liked to see some examples for adding Kanban to an existing Scrum workflow -- the authors point out that this is possible several times, but never really get into what that means. Too often, they just shrug their shoulders and say "It depends".
I guess that's what consultants are for. But if you'd rather do some reading instead of (or before) paying those consultants, this book is probably not bad place to start!
miikka's review against another edition
3.0
This book is a practical introduction to kanban in software development. The first part is a fictional story about a team adopting kanban, the second part is explaining the things mentioned in the story, and the third part has things going beyond that.
Overall it's good, but could have used some boiling down. If you're in hurry, you could read just the story in the first part and then dip in the later chapters that look interesting.
Overall it's good, but could have used some boiling down. If you're in hurry, you could read just the story in the first part and then dip in the later chapters that look interesting.
jtone's review against another edition
4.0
This is a very well written book that serves as an excellent introduction to Kanban.
tobysinclair_'s review
5.0
An awesome book about how to use Kanban. I loved the story telling approach which made this a very easy and practical read. I also liked how aspects of Scrum/XP were sprinkled throughout the book. Lots of inspiration to try this with some teams!
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