4 out of 5

Tech-jargon: bullshit that can be described in a sentence or a word, and yet, about which you’ll find bloated books or endlessly nested wikipedia articles explaining.  (Yes, this is true for most jargon, as the need for some unique label seems borne out of our desire to be unique in a sea of billion similars, spending our lives – pages, in book form – justifying why our version of X is different from our neighbors (jesus christ you are right to point out the irony of my trying to justify something or other in the middle of this review (…and the sad big-picture that this review is part of a larger justification of my own ‘uniqueness’ via this cache of reviews I’ve been building (…and… and… uh… (…uuuuuuuhhhhhhh…)))).)  So it’s already amusing that we’re going to slip ‘breathtaking’ in to the title of this 40-page pamphlet as a boast of its briefness when it’s goal is to cover a process – scrum – that’s intended to breakdown workflow into bite-sized iterations.  Also, wink wink, it’s an ‘agile’ introduction.  The book is all about wink winking, and doing it hard, and though it’s not a bad thing, it’s a little tape-on-glasses embarrassing when the book tries for some chuckles.  The overall tone is appreciated, though, and helpful in keeping the text as light as intended.

Because it does accomplish its goal of outlining the structure and key terms associated with scrum, to the extent that you wonder why it would actually take more text than this to explain… or why we would get ‘The Elements of Scrum’ (by the same authors) from which these highlights are extracted, except that Sims and Johnson must be fully aware of the different types of jargoners, and that there are those who will revel in the examples and drawn out explanations supposedly in the ‘full version’ book, versus layabouts like m’self who just need these high-levels so we can josh with the suits dropping agile-bombs and then get back to fucking work, goddammit.

Geeky humor aside, the text is also a bit childish – go for it!  go agile! – and repetitive, but again, this all sort of underlines how easy scrum can be when broken down – and clarifies how, to the book’s claim, this methodology can be applied to anything, not just tech – so this simplicity isn’t a bad thing.  Really, my review is a poor example of the rather preceise bullet-point approach of what it’s reviewing, which goes: team members; key terms; how to structure a ‘sprint’; a shoutout to agile methodology; the end.  It’s brief.  But I do legitimately now feel equipped to discuss scrum, which I had a misty understanding of before in terms of its separation from agile, so it absolutely absolutely served it’s purpose.  And all I had to do was take fifteen minutes of my time to read it.