Recommended Books for Scrum Developers

For many years I’ve shared with my Technical and Non-Technical Certified Scrum Developer attendees a list of recommended reading, updated when I find new gems. My hypothesis is that a good Developer knows that a short workshop can’t cover everything and they will be hungry for more reading. Here are my suggestions.

(Disclaimer: Some of these are affiliate links because a marketing guru said I should have them. It doesn’t cost you anything more and I might earn enough in a year for a cup of coffee.)

Agile Engineering Practices

Agile Technical Practices Distilled by Pedro Moreira Santos, Marco Consolaro, and Alessandro Di Gioia - A fairly complete introduction to the technical practices worked through in the workshop.

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code 2nd Edition by Martin Fowler - The Classic.

Clean Code Principles and Patterns, 2nd Edition by Petri Silen - Another soup-to-nuts technical practices book. FWIW, the author likes Microservices more than I do. He approaches them as a default practice. My leaning is to use them less frequently. Python edition is also available.

Your Code as a Crime Scene, 2nd Edition by Adam Tornhill — an entertaining read about remediating technical debt. (Entertaining in the development world - that’s a shock).

Refactoring at Scale: Regaining Control of Your Codebase by Maude Lemaire - A good complement to Adam’s Code as a Crime Scene, covers more the planning and coordination aspect of tidying up a big ball of mud.

Design Patterns and Language-Specific Books

Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java with JUnit, Third Edition by Jeff Langr - Covers JUnit5, however its breadth means there is value even for developers in other programming languages. Caveat, my daughter and I were pre-beta readers and have provided cover quotes endorsing the book.

Head First Design Patterns: Building Extensible and Maintainable Object-Oriented Software by Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson - For 30 years I struggled to read the original Design Patterns book. I wish this book had been written at the time. As with all O’Reilly books, given their price, they should be called O’Really.

Learning JavaScript Design Patterns: A JavaScript and React Developer’s Guide by Addy Osmani - JavaScript’s functional programming focus is different from the OO world where Design Patterns originated that helps to have a book that examines them from that viewpoint. Now Free: https://www.patterns.dev

Clean JavaScript by Software Crafters - A short book to help the developer get started on Test Driven, SOLID code.

Outside-In React Development by Josh Justice - Covers TDD from the UI on down the stack.

Agile Testing

Agile Testing Condensed by Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin - Summarizes their first two books in a way that makes Agile Testing accessible to all team members.

Explore It! Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing by Elisabeth Hendrickson - Provides depth on the oft-ignored subject of testing beyond the automation.

DevOps

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble, Gene Kim - Teaches us how to measure DevOps systems and use those measurements to improve.

The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations 2nd Edition by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis, Nicole Forsgren - The only well-written book that I’m aware of that covers how to implement DevOps.

Team Improvement

Flow Metrics for Scrum Teams by Daniel Vacanti and Will Seele - Shows how to use Work Item Age and Cycle Time to help teams drive their improvement process.

Remote Mob Programming - Home but not alone by Dr. Simon Harrer, Martin Huber, and Jochen Christ - Written just before the start of the pandemic (talk about timing). It covers how to take ensemble programming and have it work remotely.

The Coding Dojo Handbook by Emily Bache - Practices for teams to create a safe space to learn.

The Nature of Software Development: Keep It Simple, Make It Valuable, Build It Piece by Piece by Ron Jeffries.