“Large-Scale Scrum” by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde is great for anyone looking to scale Scrum up to medium and large projects. It provides a contrast to the very heavyweight Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), and “Large-Scale Scrum” comes with its own cutesy acronym, LeSS. In fact the subtitle of the book is “More with LeSS.”
The book defines two scaling models. First is standard LeSS, which Larman and Vodde say is typically used for projects with around five teams. It can certainly scale beyond there. But for much larger projects, the book also defines “LeSS Huge,” which the authors report having used on projects with over 1,000 people.
The book is organized as you might expect with chapters devoted to key Scrum topics such as the product owner, the product backlog, sprint planning, reviews and retrospectives, and so on.
I found the book to strike a perfect balance between being overly prescriptive and too general. You’ll leave the book with plenty of advice on how to scale a Scrum project. But you won’t leave feeling hamstrung by having too many rules placed on your teams.
In fact, the authors include a nice summary of LeSS and LeSS Huge rules at the end of the book, and it covers only three pages.
