Woodward et al. deliver a comprehensive, practitioner-oriented distributed Scrum guide that is suitable for both beginners and seasoned practitioners. The text provides both a quick introduction to the principles of Scrum and some practical advice on how to face the challenges posed by distributed teams. Making use of the contributors’ vast experience, the book offers examples and coping strategies for working in distributed environments, as well as best practices from the IBM pool of experts. In the context of distributed environments, it thoroughly reviews and explains the Scrum team, backlogs, and user stories. The introduction to Scrum focuses on the basics of this software development approach and defines the terminology that will be used throughout the rest of the book; this section will be really useful to beginners. The authors also explain the drivers behind distributed software development and establish a typology that will be used to choose between different coping strategies. Furthermore, they provide some background on IBM’s use of Scrum.

The book carefully analyzes, in terms of culture, technology, and social and process differences, the challenges faced by distributed teams. The sequence of the sections follows the Scrum structure, and every step in the methodology is addressed in view of the challenges and typologies described in the introduction. From the perspective of an English nonnative speaker, the book is relatively easy to read; that being said, the authors use idioms and slang that might hamper understanding. Unfortunately, the book also suffers from some typographical errors.