[Review] The Dream Team Nightmare

My previous experience with agile books was not so good. For one thing, they’re overfilled with advices and strategies, often without context. Put differently, it always required some additional effort, to imagine newly discovered strategies in my past experience. As a consequence, it may not be properly understand and implemented by my.

5 days of team live
Main character of this book is a agile coach. He is hired by a company to help with underperforming team - the Dream Team. The book is sliced into about 250 chapters.  In addition, every chapter is a new chance to learn something new. I've marked 26 notes, related to:

• decision making
• dealing with situations under pressure
• meeting techniques (e.g. retrospectives)
• asking correct questions
• self-organization
• effective communication
• good practices (or habits)
• metering possibilities
• planning
• preserving an argument

Most significantly, you can clearly see all these techniques in the same order as in Spock testing framework.

1. Given - full specification of the problem
2. When - action taken to resolve
3. Then - result of those actions

Reading this book

You can find it, in a book category on amazon. But it is really a book? I do not think so. It was more like game for me. 

Every ~10 chapters you have to made a decision. Every decision you made may lead to fail or success of your mission. At first I was confused about this approach and I came back to previous choices and where they lead me. 

After reading a about 50 pages I decided to draw a chapter graph (with decision), and come back to paths that I not chosen when I read the whole book.

Outcome

As a result, I've managed to made only good choices and lead the team to happy ending. The graph was on five A4 pages. It looks like this:

In contrast to good choices, failure paths showed me where the team my end. Learning from someone else mistakes is most important lesson for me.

I would like to thank Wojtek Erbetowski for recommending me this book.