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I have been interested in practical software process improvement initiatives for a number of years now, and I stress the word practical. The world of theory is fine, but what most people want is help and advice based in the real world, the world where companies, projects, teams, people, and processes are not perfect. Copyright notice: All reader-contributed material on freshmeat.net is the property and responsibility of its author; for reprint rights, please contact the author directly.
That being the case, this book provides the reader with a good grounding in the major issues and possible actions that can be taken for teams that want to become more agile. Starting with a decent introduction to the theoretical side of the general Agile movement, this book devotes the majority of its pages to covering a variety of topics that are applicable to most projects, including:
I liked the way that different Agile Practices are compared and contrasted, an exercise that helps to cement in the reader's mind the relative strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches. Peter Schuh has obviously been through enough projects and hit enough problems to be able to focus on the practicalities that cut through to the important elements that teams will want to learn about. For those groups that are interested in moving to a more agile way of working, reading this book would be an excellent way of fostering a shared understanding of what is involved and the issues and pitfalls that might lay ahead. This in itself would be a very good starting point and one that virtually any team could get to in a short period of time without overstretching the budget. Once you have reached this point, you will be in a much better position to decide which elements of which methodology are best for you and to have an idea of what your adoption strategy should be. Since this is a book aimed at the broad "Agile" movement, this is the point at which you will need to look elsewhere in order to progress to the detailed application of these practices. This is not a slight on this book; by reading it, you will be moving on, armed with enough knowledge to make the process less confusing and increase your capacity to make informed decisions. If you have yet to be convinced that Agile practices are more effective than more traditional methodologies, I would also highly recommend reading the excellent book by Craig Larman, Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide. Author's bio: Dean Margerison has over 15 years of experience in managing software development projects for a variety of companies and industries (including computer games: Bugs Life). He has more recently been involved in a number of process improvement programs adopting iterative development techniques under the Unified Process and Rational Unified Process. This coupled with automated builds and unit testing to provide greatly-improved development potential. The author of papers on the development process and a regular speaker on the topic, Dean currently works as an independent consultant through his company, Dekam. T-Shirts and Fame! We're eager to find people interested in writing articles on software-related topics. We're flexible on length, style, and topic, so long as you know what you're talking about and back up your opinions with facts. Anyone who writes an article gets a t-shirt from ThinkGeek in addition to 15 minutes of fame. If you think you'd like to try your hand at it, let jeff.covey@freshmeat.net know what you'd like to write about. [Comments are disabled]
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A very good book I have just bought this book and I must say that it is really worth to buy it. Very comprehensive. So this book is my recommendation if you want to delve deeper into this topic.
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UK Purchase URL Purchase URL is USA only. UK purchase URL is UK Purchase URL (not my site but cheaper of ones I found) Cheers BozMo --
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Re: UK Purchase URL You can also get it from Amazon. --
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