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This week's April meeting of the AgileNorth group was a book review. Kevin Dockerill reviewed Mary Poppendieck's Lean Software Development and Ken Schwaber's Agile Software Development with Scrum. We spent about forty-five minutes discussing each book, and then half and hour or so comparing the two methods, particularly in relation to applying them in Kevin's own small team.

While reading the books in preparation for the meeting, Kevin had created a little summary leaflet for each. Each leaflet was in two parts: the first stepped through the book's chapters picking out the main points, while the second provided Kevin's commentary and opinion. (In the case of the Scrum book, Kevin also rated each chapter out of 10 - from which we discovered that the first half was much more to his taste than the second!) The format of Kevin's little leaflets worked extremely well, and I would recommend this kind of approach for any subsequent book review. I particularly liked the idea of chapter ratings, which gave us an at-a-glance view of Kevin's opinion and also highlighted the two very different halves of the Scrum book.

As the meeting progressed, the discussion moved away from the books and on to comparing and contrasting the two methods - Scrum vs. lean. I was too engaged for taking notes, but I recall some main themes emerging in the opinion of the group as a whole:

• Scrum is likely to serve well in a traditional, structured, command-and-control organisation, where strong project management and reporting lines reign. Whereas the Lean book offers a bag of tools, and so will probably appeal to more 'fluid' organisations.
• The mapping of software development to manufacturing is not helpful to organisations that aren't used to growing their own processes and adapting them regularly.
• The Lean book maps specific practices from lean manufacturing into software development, without providing enough background on why those practices are appropriate.
• It seems unlikely that many software projects could go 30 days without changing their requirements; so Scrum seems to be targeted at bigger projects.

What were your first impressions when you read these two books?