Best Books on TDD, Agile, and SCRUM by Woody Zuill

My friend, Woody Zuill, is a developer and manager that I respect an awful lot. Recently he was asked to recommend great books on agile software development. Since Woody is always reading, he seemed like a great guy to ask. His response was thoughtful and interesting, so I thought I'd post it below:

"The books I've found useful all have holes in them. You have to get a fair amount of bad to get a small amount of good.

- For me, the Lean books by the Poppendiecks were probably the most good with the least bad.

- Kent Beck's XP book - both editions. I think you need both to get it all. These books have been very useful to me. A lot more real stuff and real thinking than most of the "How To Agile" books.

- Kent Beck's TDD book

- The second edition of Alistair Cockburn's book - Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game. I think the first edition missed the boat in a lot of things. I think he must have learned a lot by the time the second edition came out. I don't know how experienced he actually is, but I like the nature of his book. Note: His book on How to Survive an OOP project was one of the worst books I have seen.

- Of course, Michael Feather's Legacy Code book is great. I recommend that for all developers.

- And Bob Martin's Clean Code and Agile Software Development books are must reads. The Bob Martin Agile book is overall probably the most useful book I've read (on software development) - but it is a hard read in some ways, and very difficult to sort through.

- I found Diana Larsen and Esther Derby's Agile Retrospectives book very useful to adjust my thinking about making teams work well.

I used to like Mike Cohn's books on estimating and so on - but only barely. Not so much anymore. Same with Ken Schwaber's Scrum books, in some ways I wish they were never written.

I'ver read about 20 or 30 books on the topic, and flipped through a lot of others. Most are misleading at best. Knowing what I know about things in general, I suspect a lot of this garbage is written by people who don't really know what they are talking about and aren't able to admit it to themselves. I want to believe that - otherwise the authors are being purposely misleading or deceptive and I am not ready to accept that.

There is one book that I really loved, and felt the guy was actually right on - but I searched all over the Internet tonight looking for it and couldn't find it. When I get home I'll look around and see if I can find it. [ I found it: "Sustainable Software Development: An Agile Perspective" by Kevin Tate. I must have "loaned" it to someone because I couldn't find it anywhere at home. I remember it as being very good and humble - but I read it about 5 years ago and haven't seen it since so a re-read is in order, and I reserve the right to change my mind about its usefulness. ]

Well... there have been a lot of good in a lot of those (and other) books. And for me, the main use was to help me think through things. There is a lot of garbage to sift through, though."

Great stuff, huh? Below are links to all the books he references in the email:

Kent Beck's Books

Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game

Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Bob Martin's Books

Clean Code

Esther Derby's Agile Retrospectives

Mike Cohn's Books

And the gem:

Sustainable Software Development