Customer Reviews

Agility and Discipline Made Easy: Practices from OpenUP and RUP

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Must reading for anyone responsible for successfully delivering development projects of any size.

Based on six key development principles, this book provides 20 proven concrete practices, derived from thousands of engagements. Flexibility is a key concept of the book. You can choose one or all of the practices to adopt for your organization. Picking those practices which best fit into your current process and most needed by you, makes it easy to begin realizing benefits today.

The advice given for each practice is practical, concise and reflects the authors' obvious depth of experience in the trenches. Three different levels of adoption are provided for each practice, enabling you to bite off just enough, but not too much, to swallow. The book emphasizes effectiveness, clearly describing why the practice is effective and tying the practice back to its core principle.

This book incorporates useful ideas from all the popular processes and successfully blends them together into what is described as the Unified Process. Basically, this book makes process improvements accessible to everyone. It enables you to make incremental changes, in an iterative manner, to effectively manage the transition to a better development process for your particular organization.

The software development industry has been waiting for a process which ties together the collective process knowledge acquired by the industry throughout the years. This book is a fundamental reflection of the process community which is currently evolving. Buy it, read it and become a part of the growing community around software development processes. You are likely to find it a very enjoyable and rewarding experience.

If you consider yourself an agile developer, but you keep getting heat from management about more discipline, this is a great book to get some perspective with. Taking individual practices from RUP and applying them "just enough" in key places can build trust and improve communication inside development and with external customers and other political stakeholders.

The authors do a great job too of explaining the range of formality available to a team and what the factors are that should push you towards greater formality - such as distributed teams, lack of trust, stakeholders external to the team, etc.

And if you are tied to more formal methods, the book can help you understand when it might be safe to try a little less formality.

There is no agile bashing in the book. It's clear they understand the ideas behind the movement. They explicitly recognize the discipline required by agile developers and point out anti-patterns for project teams that mostly align with what agile teams know to be true.

Yes, it is weird to have the RUP guys talking about agile, but agile teams work best when they are focused on continuous improvement, and there is a lot to learn here for any development team.

The goal of this book is to present good practices for software development that are based on OpenUP and RUP, but independently from these processes. The practices are grouped according to six principles:
* Demonstrate value iteratively
* Focus continuously on quality
* Balance stakeholder priorities
* Collaborate across teams
* Elevate the level of abstraction
* Adapt the process

For each practice, the authors propose a definition, practical advice on how to apply and adopt the practice, related practices and further readings. This material is very practical and contains many references to "real life" situations. The practices are selected from RUP and OpenUP and each chapter has a section devoted to compare the situation in other approaches, mainly XP and Scrum.

This book is full of practical knowledge and I will recommend it to every software developer. The only thing that bothers me is that the authors seemed to be forced to assign the "agile" label on their UP practices, with the implicit assumption that "if it is not waterfall, it is agile" and "if it is not agile it is not good".

Well put together, not overly repetitive, offers a basic understanding of OpenUP and RUP that will be helpful to any software development manager. Covers the full spectrum of development - you can skip over the areas of your expertise, while benefitting from topics of which you know little. Internal references also quite useful - the book was clearly written with an eye towards information architecture!

For so many of the people that I meet as a RUP mentor, they commonly hold the same misconceptions of RUP as being a heavyweight or non-agile choice.
In this book, Per and Bruce show how utilising the separate concepts, principles and practices to be found in RUP, the right level of agility and process efficiency can be found for your software development scenario.
I believe this to be the essential book for anyone undertaking either their personal, or even an organisational, adoption of RUP.