Books, authors and stuff that inspired me in the last years

“As part of learning, we read books, blogs, etc… What was the most influential book you read in your journey as scrum master, and what was the most significant lesson you took from that book?” — Vasco Duarte

“Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit” by Mary and Tom Poppendieck

This book taught me how deeply are related and interconnected all the values, principles and practices of XP and Scrum with Lean.

I learned that what I did every day using agile principles is something that has a reason beyond the world of software, that has roots in principles that can be valid in many contexts like organizing the work in an hospital, preparing dishes in a restaurant…

I learned what is a pull system, what is a value stream map and how is applicable even to map the flow of production of a can of coca cola.

I learned that you cannot just copy some practices to have the same benefits of Lean if you don’t get the values behind them, and this is so true even for Scrum and XP.

I learned of how different contracts can help or gets in the way of an agile project.

Probably it’s time for me to read it again :)

“Turn the Ship Around” by David Marquet

I learned that even the worst performing organization can become an outperforming team using a set of working practices, a shared vision and a set of core values.

And that leadership is not the one that you can imagine looking at movies, where you have the leader standing in front of all and leading all to the victory through heroic acts and commands. Leadership instead is communicating to people their potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves (quote by Stephen Covey).

And I also found many many correlations with the practices of XP and Scrum.

For example, he talks about “Clarity”…

Clarity means people at all levels of an organization clearly and completely understand what the organization is about.” “This is needed because people in the organization make decisions against a set of criteria that includes what the organization is trying to accomplish. If clarity of purpose is misunderstood, then the criteria by which a decision is made will be skewed, and suboptimal decisions will be made.”

Writing goals means committing to each other, and clarifying (to oneself and to their peers) what the real purpose is.

This is why different agile practices works so well:

• Pair programming means continually clarifying one’s intents and actions to the others. Moreover, you have to do it verbally, so a more strong and unambiguous process of internal revision has to take place, before the actual words come out of your mouth.
• Daily Journal is a way to clarify, by telling the story of your day at job. What happened? What did you learn? What did you surprise? What worked well? What ideas came to your mind?
• TDD is a way of discovering and declaring a clear intent on the behavior you want the system (and their elements) to have. This brings clarity and triggers discussions.

“Becoming a Technical Leader” by Gerald M. Weinberg

Wonderful book, so inspiring… despite the title it’s a book about our profession and how are the real characteristics of great coach: the ability to observe, to communicate properly, clearly, to observe himself also. I took the idea of keeping a daily journal, which BTW is a practice the I use at work with my teams for years. And there I discovered Virgina Satir and her communication model.

More authors and material I found inspiring in the last year

I love all the stuff by Linda Rising, I listened to two wonderful podcast on SERadio, one is about the retrospective and the other is about fearless change… she’s wonderful, inspiring and so wise.

There are several videos of her talking about the Agile Mindset and the fixed mindset… My lesson here is that fixed mindset is always behind the corner, lurking, and you should always strive for improving your agility, improve and shorten the feedback loop, communicate better and so on.

And Vasco Duarte’s ScrumMaster Toolbox podcast it’s wonderful, so wonderful that it is in our learning path for agile coaches of our company, XPeppers!

I read many blog posts, every day, from technical stuff to coaching and agile stuff, and so on.

I found always inspiring the posts published by Martin Fowler and Ron Jeffries.