Best and Most Up-to-date Agile/Lean Books

On Twitter I asked my followers “Which books do you think are the best/most up-to-date in terms of Agile/Lean thinking?”

I received 24 recommendations for 18 books.

There were 5 books that were mentioned by people twice. The “winners” are:

• Toyota Kata – Mike Rother (2009)
• Principles of Product Development Flow – Donald Reinertsen (2009)
• Succeeding with Agile – Mike Cohn (2009)
• The Lean Startup – Eric Ries (2011)
• Management 3.0 – some dude called Jürgen Apello (2011)

And then there were some other great books mentioned once:

• Managing to Learn – John Shook (2008)
• Understanding A3 Thinking – Durward K. Sobek, Art Smalley (2008)
• Scaling Lean & Agile Development – Craig Larman, Bas Vodde (2008)
• The Checklist Manifesto – Atul Gawande (2009)
• Kanban – David Anderson (2010)
• Coaching Agile Teams – Lyssa Adkins (2010)
• De Kracht van Scrum (Dutch) – Rini van Solingen, Eelco Rustenburg (2010)
• Radical Management – Stephen Denning (2010)
• Personal Kanban – Jim Benson (2011)
• Adapt – Tim Harford (2011)

And some books that are actually not very recent at all:

• Learning to See – Mike Rother, John Shook (1999)
• Extreme Programming Explained – Kent Beck (2004)
• A Whole New Mind – Daniel Pink (2006)

Finally, my own additions to this interesting list:

• Continuous Delivery – Jez Humble, David Farley (2010)
• Specification by Example – Gojko Adzic (2011)
• The Agile Samurai – Jonathan Rasmusson (2011)

But feel free to reply to this blog post and add some more! 🙂

For more suggestions, see the Top 100 Agile Books (Edition 2011)