After having read many books on agile software development, this is the book that finally made the entire system hang together for me. Cohn walks through all of the various aspects of agile planning, providing reasoning about why various approaches are taken as well as how to go about executing them. While the flow of the book can be a bit jarring at times, jumping from one topic to a seemingly unrelated one between chapters, I still came away from the book with a much better understanding of the end-to-end agile planning process.
The book only briefly covers multi-team planning so further reading regarding this may be warranted if you have that need. There are also sections of the book that gloss over some rather large topics (Kano studies, as an example) but the light coverage and accompanied references can lead to jumping off points for those who want more information. A few sections do contain essentially throw-away recommendations (such as the section on task breakdown of stories) but such sections are often in areas that real-world teams will have experience anyhow so it wasn't a big detractor for me. Lastly, if you're looking for advice on running an agile process with a distributed (off-shore) team, this book doesn't touch on any of those challenges.
As with most books on agile, this book carries on the tradition of focusing solely on the people processes without any recognition that certain *engineering* processes or practices (test-driven, continuous integration, etc) are necessary for long-term sustainability of an agile process. This is my number one complaint with all agile process books, and I've yet to find one that states, let alone defines, a certain level of software engineering organizational maturity is necessary before embarking on an agile process.
Despite these few drawbacks, this book did succeed in finally making the entire agile planning process click for me personally. After reading several of Ken Schwaber's books on the same topic I understood agile in the abstract but this book really brought it all together into a cohesive, pragmatic approach for me.Get more detail about Agile Estimating and Planning.
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