Books Guide: Agile & Lean Software Development

Great user experiences (UX) are essential for products today, but designing one can be a lengthy and expensive process. With this practical, hands-on book, you’ll learn how to do it faster and smarter using Lean UX techniques. UX expert Laura Klein shows you what it takes to gather valuable input from customers, build something they’ll truly love, and reduce the time it takes to get your product to market.

This book presents a fresh approach that is tested by fire: developed by the author in over twenty years of experience hiring software professionals at both small companies and large. Drawing on principles from the "agile" software development movement, this book offers a different way to think about hiring.

Agile has become today’s dominant software development paradigm, but agile methods remain difficult to measure and improve. Essential Skills for the Agile Developer fills this gap from the bottom up, teaching proven techniques for assessing and optimizing both individual and team agile practices.

Great emphasis is typically placed on the “mechanics” of agile development--its processes and tools. It’s easy to forget that the Agile Manifesto values individuals and interactions ahead of processes and tools. You can gain powerful benefits by refocusing on the people side of agile development. This book will show you how. 

In many organizations, management is the biggest obstacle to successful Agile development. Unfortunately, reliable guidance on Agile management has been scarce indeed. Now, leading Agile manager Jurgen Appelo fills that gap, introducing a realistic approach to leading, managing, and growing your Agile team or organization.

Agile Development and Business Goals describes a unique, state-of-the-art methodology that aligns the critical but often "silo-ed" software development process with core company goals. Eschewing long-winded "agile philosophy" in favor of a formally prioritized process, this book serves as a distilled learning guide for managing technical resources in a manner that directly boosts your bottom line.

Game development is in crisis—facing bloated budgets, impossible schedules, unmanageable complexity, and death march overtime. It’s no wonder so many development studios are struggling to survive. Fortunately, there is a solution. Scrum and Agile methods are already revolutionizing development outside the game industry. Now, long-time game developer Clinton Keith shows exactly how to successfully apply these methods to the unique challenges of game development.

Agile approaches are business practices with a proven track record for helping organizations achieve greater efficiency, higher-quality outputs and increased customer satisfaction. They enable organizations to avoid the trappings of extensive up-front planning and up-front budget commitments by encouraging staff to regularly produce high-value business outputs; and by basing ongoing financial and resource commitments on the delivered outcomes.

As an agile coach, you can help project teams become outstanding at agile, creating products that make them proud and helping organizations reap the powerful benefits of teams that deliver both innovation and excellence.

Kanban is becoming a popular way to visualize and limit work-in-progress in software development and information technology work. Teams around the world are adding kanban around their existing processes to catalyze change and deliver better business agility.

This is the first start-to-finish, real-world guide to ATDD for every agile project participant. Leading agile consultant Ken Pugh begins with a dialogue among a customer, developer, and tester, explaining the “what, why, where, when, and how” of ATDD and illuminating the experience of participating in it.

A Tale of Two Systems: Lean and Agile Software Development for Business Leaders reviews two different fictional systems development projects: Cremins United (CU) and Troubled Real Estate Information Management (TRIM). Both were done at the imaginary Cremins Corporation, a venerable printing company trying to transform itself to survive in the Internet age.

Best practices for managing projects in agile environments–now updated with new techniques for larger projects

Agile methods are revolutionizing software development, and one of the key principles of agile development is that developers write tests. But if that's the case, what’s the role of a tester? Do agile teams need members with QA backgrounds? And what does it really mean to be an "agile tester?"

You want to write professional-grade applications: Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework, with integrated support for unit, functional, and integration testing. It enforces good design principles, consistency of code across your team (and across your organization), and proper release management.

Bridging the Communication Gap is a book about improving communication between customers, business analysts, developers and testers on software projects, especially by using specification by example and agile acceptance testing. These two key emerging software development practices can significantly improve the chances of success of a software project. They ensure that all project participants speak the same language, and build a shared and consistent understanding of the domain.

Building on their breakthrough bestsellers Lean Software Development and Implementing Lean Software Development, Mary and Tom Poppendieck’s latest book shows software leaders and team members exactly how to drive high-value change throughout a software organization—and make it stick. They go far beyond generic implementation guidelines, demonstrating exactly how to make lean work in real projects, environments, and companies.

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.

Agile methods are a collection of different techniques and practices that share the same values and basic principles. Agile Software Development Quality Assurance provides in-depth coverage of the most important concepts, issues, trends, and technologies in agile software. This Premier Reference Source presents the research and instruction used to develop and implement software quickly, in small iteration cycles, and in close cooperation with the customer in an adaptive way.

Accelerating Process Improvement Using Agile Techniques enhances the likelihood of success for IT projects. This volume describes a proven method for accelerating process improvement that helps set the goals and directions of organizations. The book offers several real-world scenarios describing situations prevalent throughout IT organizations regardless of the primary business in which a company may be engaged.

With the award-winning book Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices, Robert C. Martin helped bring Agile principles to tens of thousands of Java and C++ programmers. Now .NET programmers have a definitive guide to agile methods with this completely updated volume from Robert C. Martin and Micah Martin, Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#.

The agile model of software development has taken the world by storm. Now, in Agile Software Development, Second Edition, one of agile’s leading pioneers updates his Jolt Productivity award-winning book to reflect all that’s been learned about agile development since its original introduction.

This book draws on the Poppendiecks' unparalleled experience helping development organizations optimize the entire software value stream. You'll discover the right questions to ask, the key issues to focus on, and techniques proven to work. The authors present case studies from leading-edge software organizations, and offer practical exercises for jumpstarting your own Lean initiatives.

This book describes using the ICONIX Process (an object modeling process) in an Agile software project. To do this, the book defines a core Agile subset, so those of you who want to "get Agile" need not spend years learning to do it. Instead, you can simply read this book and apply the core subset of techniques. The book follows a real-life .NET/C# project from inception and UML modeling, to working code--through several iterations.

Master Java 5.0, object-oriented design, and Test-Driven Development (TDD) by learning them together. Agile Java weaves all three into a single coherent approach to building professional, robust software systems. Jeff Langr shows exactly how Java and TDD integrate throughout the entire development lifecycle, helping you leverage today's fastest, most efficient development techniques from the very outset.

The "Agile Method" was coined in February 2001 to refer to software development methods designed to respond to change during software projects and stressing "individuals and interactions over processes and tools" and customer collaboration. Koch (president of the training and consulting company, ASK Process, Inc.) provides an introduction to Agile software development that he hopes will allow managers to weigh its costs and benefits.

Software development projects can be fun, productive, and even daring. Yet they can consistently deliver value to a business and remain under control. Extreme Programming (XP) was conceived and developed to address the specific needs of software development conducted by small teams in the face of vague and changing requirements.

This is your hands-on, "in-the-trenches" guide to successfully leading Agile projects. Agile methods promise to infuse development with unprecedented flexibility, speed, and value; and these promises are attracting IT organizations worldwide. However, agile methods often fail to clearly define the manager's role, and many managers have been reluctant to buy in.

Apply the principles of Scrum, one of the most popular agile programming methods, to software project management -and focus your team on delivering real business value. Author Ken Schwaber, a leader in the agile process movement and a co-creator of Scrum, brings his vast expertise to helping you guide the product and software development process more effectively and efficiently.

A software developer and systems engineer join forces, using examples and case studies to illustrate the differences and similarities between agile and plan-driven methods, showing that the best development strategies combine both attributes. -Book News, Inc.

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.

User Stories Applied offers a requirements process that saves time, eliminates rework, and leads directly to better software. The best way to build software that meets users' needs is to begin with "user stories": simple, clear, brief descriptions of functionality that will be valuable to real users. In User Stories Applied, Mike Cohn provides you with a front-to-back blueprint for writing these user stories and weaving them into your development lifecycle.

From the Back Cover

The one-stop guide for everyone getting started with eXtreme Programming!

* Making XP principles work in the real world
* Best practices for the entire project lifecycle: conceptualization through delivery
* Understand the role of every participant: developer, manager, and customer
* Specific solutions to the most common XP transitioning problems

In a highly volatile software development environment, developers must be nimble, responsive, and able to hit a moving target--in short, they must be agile. Agile software development is designed to address this need for speed and flexibility. Agility describes a holistic, collaborative environment in which you can both create and respond to change by focusing on adaptability over predictability, people over process.

Web development teams have been operating in the dark for far too long. The lack of proven development methodologies for the Web environment has meant a constant struggle for developers to produce quality Web-based projects, on time and within budget.

Software Configuration Management Patterns alleviates software engineers' most common concerns about software configuration management (SCM)--perceived rigidity and an overemphasis on process. This book demonstrates how effective SCM strategies promote a healthy, team-oriented culture that produces better software. Through the use of patterns, the authors show that properly managed workflow can avert delays, morale problems, and cost overruns. The patterns approach illustrates how SCM can be easily and successfully applied in small- to mid-sized organizations. By learning how these patterns relate to each other, readers can avoid common mistakes that too often result in frustrated developers and reduced productivity. Key coverage includes instruction on how to: develop the next version of a product while fixing problems with the current one; develop code in parallel with others and join up with the current state of code line; identify what versions of code went into a particular component; analyze where a change happened in the history of a component's development; use current tools more effectively, and decide when to use a manual process; introduce good practices into individual workspaces and throughout the organization; identify crucial aspects of the software process, so that team projects can run smoothly; build and foster a development environment focused on producing optimal teamwork and quality products.

(From the Back Cover) "Coming of age for software developers means understanding that software is a cooperative effort, not something individuals do in isolation. This is a book that teams of software developers can thrive upon, full of sensible advice for a cooperative development approach." --Tom DeMarco, The Atlantic Systems Guild

(From the Back Cover)