Customer Reviews

Agile Software Construction

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This book ostensibly focuses on "emerging methods and approaches that are loosely described as Agile and shows how to apply them effectively...." Topics covered include Agile Modeling, Extreme Programming, Feature Driven Development, Agile Methods with RUP and PRINCE2. The author's a Brit (hence the reference to PRINCE2, pretty much unknown outside the UK). There's an overwhelming emphasis on Agile Modeling and XP and, although the books introduction states that it "....brings together a range of the most popular Agile Methods," Scrum, probably the second most popular Agile approach along with XP, receives only around one page and half a dozen cursory references.

While the author emphasizes XP heavily, there is very little attempt to examine the limitations of XP. The coverage of Agile Modeling is pretty lightweight and it's not really a "how to effectiely use Agile" book either. Overall, my assessment is this is pretty lightweight, not especially usefuland there's better books out there that focus on how to introduce and use Agile effectively. There's also better "overview" books out there with a more inclusive coverage of Agile Processes and Approaches for those who want an introduction. And for non-UK reader, the PRINCE2 coverage is pretty much irrelevant.

Not worth your time. Wasn't worth mine either but I'd already spent it so I thought the least I could do is spare others the pain. Sorry John. Better luck with the next one.

The book takes far too favourable a view of Extreme Programming [XP]. It ignores increasing results from industry about the brittleness of XP. You would benefit more by looking up "Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP" by Stephens and Rosenberg. It goes into gory details about actual XP attempts, including the famous initial one at Chrysler.

Which is not to say that Hunt's book is entirely wrong. Parts of it, like the need for unit testing, are not bad at all. It should be adopted in many projects. And the waterfall approach does have severe problems. But you can buy into agile programming without necessarily going to the extreme of XP.