.Introduction
What I liked the most in this book is that it is completely oriented to the real world. Therefore it will not try to teach you any of the existing agile frameworks but will help you to make your company (team) agile taking into account all constraints surrounding you. Book is oriented around agile principles and authors consider you environment agile if you are following agile manifesto principles.
Another value of the book is that agile introduction is taken from the complete beginning. From company readiness assessment up to the project deployment and spreading your agile process through out the whole company. The whole project lifecycle is covered. From the vision, through adapting idea to the deployment. This is something that I was missing the most in lot of books about agile.
Book follows imaginary company Acme media and its move toward more agile environment.
Getting started chapter will explain how to check your company readiness to adopt agile processes, ensure buy-in and inject agility into your existing process. When you have selected pilot project you are moving forward.
Kicking off chapter explains how to make feasibility study and how to decide if you should continue or stop with the project.
If you decided to continue with the project Populating the product backlog chapter will show how to create product backlog, what means "just enough" for a feature card and how to estimate and prioritize the product backlog.
Enough information for scheduling creates release plan and explains in how much details you should plan your iterations. And don't forget that having plan is not enough. What you need is planning because during the project your plan will change for sure.
When you have release and iteration plan you can move to the Building the product chapter. You will see how to welcome change, how to apply agile principles into development and how to ensure that you have working software at the end of iteration.
Embracing change chapter cope with adapting to change requirements. It explains common reasons for requirement changes and how to adapt to them. Next parts of this chapter will show you how to plan deploying and how to improve your process using retrospective.
If your pilot project was successful you will want to spread the agile process throughout the company. The Moving forward chapter will help you with this process.
Rest of the book explains the whole process from two different points of view. In one chapter the overall diagram of the project lifecycle is displayed and shortly explained while another chapter contains text description of the overall process.
Conclusion
Although at the beginning I was not sure if I want to read this book I must admit I have really enjoyed reading the book. I believe that this book must be mandatory read for anyone who want to become member of agile community.
The only downside of the book is that it covers really wide area (complete project lifecycle) and thus after reading this book you will need to read other books to improve your knowledge about e.g. estimating, testing, writing good user stories...
I really recommend this book to everyone that already are or want to enter the agile world.
3 comments:
Does it explain WHY? It is, in my opinion, the most important thing to learn about agile.
Without that I hear sentences like "We are trying to be agile" while writing and reviewing user stories for 2nd month in row without running actual iteration.
Without knowing WHY people try to emulate process and remove parts they seem unsuitable in their environment claiming waterfall is not so different from agile approach :-D
Actually they are describing WHY in some situation they are making given decisions.
But also they are not removing parts as unsuitable. They are not trying to accommodate any well known agile framework (like SCRUM, XP, RUP...).
They did what I believe even better approach. They took agile manifesto and try to find process that will follow agile principles.
Nice review, I will check it out as I've just started a university course on Software Engineering. It should definitely come on handy.
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