Review By: Harry L. Kirkpatrick
06/17/2010This book is easy to read and understand. I would recommend it to people eager to learn Agile and iterative methods including the four noteworthy methods: Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), the Unified Process (UP), and Evo. The book includes a FAQ chapter, a tips chapter of common practices, and plenty of paper hyperlinks, all of which should help to shorten the reader’s learning curve. If you need to make a case for an iterative project, this book provides the key reasons, research, examples of large projects, standards, a business case, and promotion by well-known leaders. The book has several Web resources that the reader can use to obtain additional information. The author begins each chapter with a quote, My favorite is the one in chapter 5: If you are going through hell, keep going.—Sir Winston Churchill.

I think novices, experts, and those in between can use the book. The figures, examples, and overall flow of the book are very impressive. The book cites the Agile Manifesto, which basically says that individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change is more important than processes and tools, comprehensive documentation, contract negotiation, and following a plan. The book also refers to the Agile Principles. Of the thirteen principles, there are two that I find very interesting:

#8) Agile processes promote sustainable development.
#9) The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

If your organization is applying a waterfall–oriented (or any other) process and has high success rates, productivity, and so forth, don't change. As stated in the book, the motivation to adopt an iterative lifecycle rather than the waterfall is that research now shows the former is associated with lower risk and better success, productivity, and defect rates.

The book is a must read whether you're an IT executive, project manager, or developer. The author will help you understand the promise of Agile / iterative development, sell it throughout your organization and transform the promise into reality.