Agile Software Development Ecosystems
In a highly volatile software development environment, developers must be nimble, responsive, and able to hit a moving target--in short, they must be agile. Agile software development is designed to address this need for speed and flexibility. Agility describes a holistic, collaborative environment in which you can both create and respond to change by focusing on adaptability over predictability, people over process. Agile software development incorporates proven software engineering techniques, but without the overhead and restrictions of traditional development methodologies. Above all, it fulfills its promise of delivering software that serves the client's business needs.
Written by one of the leaders of the Agile movement, and including interviews with Agile gurus Kent Beck, Robert Charette, Alistair Cockburn, Martin Fowler, Ken Schwaber, and Ward Cunningham, Agile Software Development Ecosystems crystallizes the current understanding of this flexible and highly successful approach to software development.
It presents the key practices of all Agile development approaches, offers overviews of specific techniques, and shows how you can choose the approach that best suits your organization.This book describes--in depth--the most important principles of Agile development: delivering value to the customer, focusing on individual developers and their skills, collaboration, an emphasis on producing working software, the critical contribution of technical excellence, and a willingness to change course when demands shift.
All major Agile methods are presented: Scrum Dynamic Systems Development Method Crystal Methods Feature-Driven Development Lean Development Extreme Programming Adaptive Software Development. Throughout the book, case stories are used to illustrate how Agile practices empower success around the world in today's chaotic software development industry. Agile Software Development Ecosystems also examines how to determine your organization's Agile readiness, how to design a custom Agile methodology, and how to transform your company into a truly Agile organization.
Review By: Rick Craig
05/11/2004Agile software development is creating a buzz throughout our industry, and many software professionals are anxious to learn about the subject. This book is a pretty good place to begin to understand what is meant by the term “agile.” Indeed, this book spends a lot of time describing what Agile development is all about and why the author and his fellow Agile advocates believe that Agile methods are (often) superior to more "traditional" methods. Much less time is spent actually describing how to implement Agile development, although one of the last chapters in the book, “Designing Your Agile Methodology,” does a nice job of introducing some of the implementation issues.
The writing style of the book is superior to most of the technical books that I have read. It reads like a "business" book, and indeed in many ways that is what it is, since the author is making a business case to the readers on the value of using Agile methods. The message in the book may be of more interest to development managers (and their bosses) than to mainstream developers.