Agile Adoption Patterns | Book Series

Overview:

Agile methods promise to help you create software that delivers far more business value—and do it faster, at lower cost, and with less pain. However, many organizations struggle with implementation and leveraging these methods to their full benefit. In this book, Amr Elssamadisy identifies the powerful lessons that have been learned about successfully moving to agile and distills them into 30 proven agile adoption patterns.

Elssamadisy walks you through the process of defining your optimal agile adoption strategy with case studies and hands-on exercises that illuminate the key points. He systematically examines the most common obstacles to agile implementation, identifying proven solutions. You’ll learn where to start, how to choose the best agile practices for your business and technical environment, and how to adopt agility incrementally, building on steadily growing success.

Next, he presents the definitive agile adoption pattern reference: all the information you need to implement the strategy that you’ve already defined. Utilizing the classic pattern format, he explains each agile solution in its proper context, revealing why it works—and how to make the most of it. The pattern reference prepares you to

  • Understand the core drivers, principles, and values associated with agile success
  • Tightly focus development on delivering business value–and recognize the “smells” of a project headed off track
  • Gain rapid, effective feedback practices: iteration, kickoff and stand-up meetings, demos, retrospectives, and much more
  • Foster team development: co-location, self-organization, cross-functional roles, and how to bring the customer aboard
  • Facilitate technical tasks and processes: testing, refactoring, continuous integration, simple design, collective code ownership, and pair programming
  • Act as an effective coach, learning to engage the community and promote learning
  • Integrate “clusters” of agile practices that work exceptionally well together

Agile Adoption Patterns will help you whether you’re planning your first agile project, trying to improve your next project, or evangelizing agility throughout your organization. This actionable advice is designed to work with any agile method, from XP and Scrum to Crystal Clear and Lean. The practical insights will make you more effective in any agile project role: as leader, developer, architect, or customer.

Authors:

Amr Elssamadisy

Published In:

June 2007

 

The Elements of Scrum | Book Series

Overview:

This book introduces Crystal Clear, a better lightweight methodology for building software. It describes the roles, teams, values, intentions, habits, activities, policies and work products of a small software development team for whom time-to-market and development costs are critical considerations. Alistair Cockburn is one of the founders of the Agile software development movement. He spells out proven best practices based on his extensive experience helping organizations build software quickly and with less cost. The author understands that small teams cannot be burdened by “process-heavy” software methodologies. By advocating that developers stay close together and remain in steady, good-will communication with customers and users, this book teaches the reader how to develop software that not only does what it is supposed to do, but also gets completed on time and within budget.

Authors:

Chris Sims  , Hillary Louise Johnson

Published In:

1 Feb 2011