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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Too Lean An Intro to Lean, March 18, 2009
This review is from: The Art of Lean Software Development (Paperback)
This is a concise work weighing in at around 120 pages. Its point is to give people a 30,000 foot overview of many things relating to Lean software development, and it's absolutely targeted to technical and business decision makers who are trying to learn a bit about how they can benefit from Lean. The problem with the book's approach is that the authors fly past points so quickly that there's not enough serious discussion of the crucial topics central to Lean. I also think the authors spent the majority of the book covering topics which aren't specific to Lean. I'm all over source control, continuous integration, test driven design/development, etc., but these are fundamentals for many other methodologies or approaches. The authors don't spend enough time hitting hard the concepts of eliminating waste, value stream mapping, tight cycles, etc. Worse yet, in the authors' attempts to give only high-level coverage of concepts they do a bad job of describing some critical issues. As an example, I screamed, literally, when I found this passage in their section on Reuse Existing Software: "Software reuse exists in many different forms, each of which affects codebase size differently: * Copying source code from one component to another reduces coding time and debugging, but it actually increases codebase size." Dudes. Really. Copy and Paste development is awful for so many reasons. An increase in codebase size is utterly the last issue you should be talking about when discussing why you should never do it. Instead, focus on the impact of copy/paste on code complexity, violation of DRY principles, the loss of clarity, increased dependencies, and the replication of bugs throughout your codebase. This isn't an awful book, and the authors generally did a good job laying out the material. I also loved that they included a good intro to Kanban. The problem is a lack of focus and a sacrifice of vital information in an attempt to turn an introduction to Lean into some sort of 30 minute infomercial.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I'm the author of this book -- Intended Audience, February 3, 2009
This review is from: The Art of Lean Software Development (Paperback)
I am one of the authors of this book and I just wanted tell you about who this book was written for and who it was not written for. If you are already well versed in either Lean or Agile software development, this book is NOT for you. If, however, you know little or nothing about Lean and Agile software development, but you've hearing the buzz about them and you want to know more without having to read a 500 page tome, this book is for you. This book is intended to introduce you to the most of the important topics in the world of Lean and Agile software development, provide some concrete guidance on what is most important, and give you references to allow you to dig deeper in each topic. If you are part of that target audience, please let me know what you think of the book. Thanks, Curt Hibbs
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Lean development, March 12, 2009
This review is from: The Art of Lean Software Development (Paperback)
I saw this book on the shelf in the local book store. I had read several things by the Poppendiecks on Lean Development; O'Reilly publishes high quality books, and so I bought it. I like the book with a few mild disappointments. First, the book is thin - about 120 pages. That is fine, but the publisher made it thin by using tiny print. Why do they do that? Second, the chapter that taught me the most was the final one. I didn't like waiting to the end to find the best part of the book. The authors start the book with the Standish Group Chaos study. I didn't think anyone did that any more. The publisher or editor should have removed that section. Then they move into descriptions of Agile methods and Lean methods. They have plenty of good material here. If you are in management and do not recognize these terms, this book is for you. The authors give proper credit to Tom and Mary Poppendieck. I didn't like their description of the Waterfall or serial model. I have seen that model work quite well in many projects under the right circumstances. A description of how to pick a model depending on the circumstances would have been good here. The major part of the book (chapters 3-8 of a 9-chapter book) describes the main practices of Lean software development. The authors present the practices in the order they recommend the reader adopt them. The practice and their recommended order of adoption are: Practice 0: Source code management and scripted builds Practice 1: Automated testing Practice 2: Continuous integration Practice 3: Less code Practice 4: Short iterations Practice 5: Customer participation There is little that is new in this book. Its good points are that, even with the tiny print, it is brief, to the point, and gives the reader a path to follow to work lean practices into an existing organization. If you are unfamiliar with lean or haven't considered it for a while, pick up this book.
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