Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility
Agile techniques have demonstrated immense potential for developing more effective, higher-quality software. However,scaling these techniques to the enterprise presents many challenges. The solution is to integrate the principles and practices of Lean Software Development with Agile's ideology and methods. By doing so, software organizations leverage Lean’s powerful capabilities for "optimizing the whole" and managing complex enterprise projects.
A combined "Lean-Agile" approach can dramatically improve both developer productivity and the software’s business value. In this book, three expert Lean software consultants draw from their unparalleled experience to gather all the insights, knowledge, and new skills you need to succeed with Lean-Agile development.
Lean-Agile Software Development shows how to extend Scrum processes with an Enterprise view based on Lean principles. The authors present crucial technical insight into emergent design, and demonstrate how to apply it to make iterative development more effective. They also identify several common development "anti-patterns" that can work against your goals, and they offer actionable, proven alternatives.
Review By: Andy Wiesendanger
06/29/2010
I started reading this book right after I finished another one on agile planning. The theme of both books was pretty much the same, although this book brought the thinking of Lean into play. However, for me, reading the two books one after the other lead to agile overload, so my thoughts should be taken with a grain of salt.
The book begins with an overview of agile and Lean methodologies, which for the most part I skipped. If you've never heard of either approach, I'm sure these first few chapters are worthwhile. But, if you've already acquainted yourself with either, it’s old hat. Then in Chapter five, the authors present some misconceptions about agile, Scrum in particular, which was informative. I do find in a lot of agile literature a dogmatic insistence on certain things, making agile rigid. It makes one feel the authors are a bit more pragmatic.
The succeeding chapters have some valuable insight and ideas. I was unable to appreciate them all due to my overload. The chapter on quality assurance and its visual controls were especially good and helpful.
Overall, I think the book can help one transition to Scrum. I wish the intro material was linked to some material on the Web and that the pages were instead used to detail some of the Kanban ideas. This could make the book more practical in explaining how one would actually implement such methodologies. I can imagine picking up this book again in a few months in order to gain some insights into improving our Scrum process.