Customer Reviews

Adapting Configuration Management for Agile Teams: Balancing Sustainability and Speed

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This book is a good guide to both CM and Agile principles, and it demonstrates how to use software configuration management to enable your team to be more agile. This book can guilde you to understanding how to manage releases in an agile environment, and how to apply basic CM concepts like build and branching successfully. This book is both a primer on agile for those with a traditional release management background, and and a primer on CM for those who understand agile. It won't replace a book on agile methods, but after reading it you will have enough background to know how to get started, and a good sense of what you need to learn more about. This book complements Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration as it is geared a bit more towards release managers, and those with a project focus than towards developers.

In addition to the basics of branching, build and release, this book covers topics such as how to leverage cloud service providers for infrastructure, how to leverage SCM to make off-shore development less painful, and how to evolve your SCM process in an agile, incremental, fashion. With a good structure that allows you to navigate the book quickly, and a good use of metaphor to describe concepts, this book will help a release managers, project managers, and architects define a SCM process that will help their agile teams do all that they can. (I was a reviewer of the manuscript. This review is based on the final edition.)

The author uses a great "skip over" approach for those already versed in Agile or CM. They can jump right into Chapter 4 from the Introduction. For those that are new to either of those concepts -- well, they can just skip buying any other books because both a CM and a Agile primer are included and laid out in a succinct and understandable style. All-in-all an approachable and organized text with plenty of diagrams that illustrate the delicate branching strategies to align Agile and CM successfully.

I've had the chance to read an early version of Mario Moreira's new book, "Adapting Configuration Management for Agile Teams: Balancing Sustainability and Speed." Mario is a long-time champion of software configuration management (SCM), agile development models and IT governance.

The book lays out core principles for CM, broadly recaps Agile, and nicely brings the two together. His core message is that highly productive Agile teams need good CM strategy and infrastructure to get software built and delivered - and that smart CM thinking is one source of continuous improvement. Mario puts to rest aside the false argument that Agile teams can do without good architecture, tools, planning and processes. Instead, he shows that the best Agile teams prefer incremental / iterative process definition in place of BEUF (big effort up front), which can be a good approach for CM professionals helping their Agile teams find a path to success.

Mario applies some great product-management-style thinking to identifying what Agilists value about CM, and therefore how to sequent (and justify) necessary investments in CM planning and tools. It's clear this comes from his deep experience at CA and Fidelity Investments, where he's persuaded lots of real participants to do the right thing. Chapter 4 of this book lays out values, perspectives and arguments that will be valuable to CM and Agile folks alike.

In many ways, this book identifies a similar cultural gap to the product manager/product owner problem I've been harping on...

Overall, this is a very good read for CM folks (who may be new to agile or dragging along preconceptions), agilists mapping out their infrastructure, and product managers/owners who should know how software is successfully built. Please find a place on your shelf for this.