Have your software projects been suffering from the age-old development problems of slipped schedules and ballooning budgets? Has your development organization experienced a variety of failed and canceled projects? If so, you may benefit from infusing some agility into your development process. Agile development breaks with a 40-year tradition of applying ever more structure and formalization to the design and development of software by advocating a return to the basic principles of satisfied customers, working software, and the willingness to accept and respond to change. As the popularity of agile development has grown, IT professionals have begun to struggle with ways to integrate agile practices and processes into traditional project environments. Integrating Agile Development in the Real World provides programmers and managers with specific and implementable ways to use agile processes in everyday software development projects. Whether read cover-to-cover, or used as a field guide during an agile transition, this book provides valuable insight into how agile practices and processes may be applied in almost any environment. Everything from how to deliver a working system sooner, acknowledge and respond to change, better meet the needs of the project's customer, to increasing software quality, and fostering a more communicative and collaborative team culture are thoroughly covered.
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About the Author
Peter Schuh (Chicago, IL) works as the Director of Information Services for Quoin, where he manages up to three onsite J2EE development teams, consisting of a mix of internal, client, and third-party employees. He has written numerous papers and articles on agile development, as well as giving tutorials and lectures at conferences such as XPUniverse, SD East, and SD West.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
not for your average programmer,
This review is from: Integrating Agile Development in the Real World (Programming Series) (Charles River Media Programming) (Paperback)
Integrating Agile Development in the Real World is basically a manual on implementing Agile development in a real-world environment. The book is well written and clear. However, this book is not for the casual reader or developer.
The "Who should read this book" section in the front says it best; it indicates that this book was written for someone who already has a strong understanding of Agile development (you can check the section out for specifics) and is wanting to attempt to implement it in their own development. Since Agile development is fairly flexible and can be applied to variety of disciplines, it also assumes you are familiar with one (for example, XP) and will be reading it with this in mind. If you aren't very familiar with these, this book is definitely not for you. If you are, then you could learn a lot from it. If you have some familiarity with one or more disciplines, however, this book could be used as a guide to adding Agile development to a development department's "toolbox". It is written from a wide-scale, departmental point of view and not intended for the solitary developer. I found some of the text to be a little too high-level and abstract to visualize. I normally feel very comfortable with the theoretical, but this book seemed almost a little too general. Again, this might be exactly what some others would want. A counter-argument could be made that should the book become too granular, it might become more of a "how to" book rather than a "why to" book. While it won't provide you the answer to your questions, it will provide the reader with the tools necessary to figure out for sure what questions your organization should ask. I also really liked how the book was divided. It provides very distinct sections, acknowledging that not all development tasks are the same. For example, there is a separate section for testing software (a subject near and....dear to my heart as a QA Engineer). This focus on testing is very much in tune with XP and test-driven development. So, overall, this is a good book. It's just not for the average programmer.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent material for a transition from a traditional approach,
By Methods & Tools Editor "www.methodsandtools.com" (Vevey Switzerland) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Integrating Agile Development in the Real World (Programming Series) (Charles River Media Programming) (Paperback)
This book provides excellent material for a transition from a traditional approach to an agile method. The book gives only a brief description of the agile methods (XP, Scrum, FDD, etc.), but you will find a detailed presentation of the best practices common to agile approaches. For each of them, the author exposes the purposes, the prerequisites, the implementation, the opportunities and obstacles.
The books provides an agile treatment of many of the daily problems of software development projects like database management, data conversion, test data management, project communication, documentation, end-user contacts or developers management. The most interesting point for me in this book is that the author recognises that you cannot always start with a white page and require an "all-agile" process. It provides information on how to integrate gradually agile practices in a traditional software development context.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent practical guide to doing agile in real world,
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This review is from: Integrating Agile Development in the Real World (Programming Series) (Charles River Media Programming) (Paperback)
If you want to learn about how to take your theoretical understanding of agile development and implement it in the real word, this is a good book for you. Very well written. Very well organized to give concrete ideas in a logical manner for successful implementation.
This book does not spend too much time on teaching basic tenets of different agile methodologies other than providing a brief overview of different agile methodologies at the beginning. That's good enough considering the objective of the book which is to give real-life "how to" implement agile development practices in the real world. The author does a good job of grouping agile practices as they apply to different sub-disciplines such as development, testing, documentation, project management, people management, communication management etc. This provides a nice way to pick and choose practices to attack some low hanging fruits first and then go for difficult ones later after getting a few successes under your belt. People management which is treated with very little detail in many books finds a good measure of treatment in this book. That is certainly refreshing. One thing I would not forget from this book is something goes like this - "Skills can be learnt by anyone with varying degrees of speed and effectiveness. Nevertheless, they can be learnt by anyone given sufficient time and training. Experience naturally comes with time. But, character is one thing that is ingrained in a person. So, while hiring people do not focus only on skills and experience but pay close attention to the character." Of course, teaching how to hire right people is not one of the objectives of the book. But, the fact that the author recognizes the very important but hard to quantify character as one of the most important attributes while selecting team shows his maturity and hard earned battle proven expertise in the real world. Best practices get very limited treatment in the areas of requirements engineering, documentation, integrating other important cross functional disciplines such as user training, outbound product management, tech support. However, while delivering a large software product, these functions play very important role and practicing agile may have serious impact on their work as well. Offshore development and large distributed development also gets very minimal treatment. All in all a great book on the basics of how to do agile in real world.
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