Review By: Stuart M. Miller
06/17/2010This book is a good read for anyone in an organization that is considering adopting agile or already utilizing agile methodologies. It summarizes the available benefits of utilizing agile for your development process and for incorporating it into your portfolio management.

The author begins by introducing some motivations for adopting agile methodologies as well as giving a high-level overview of what agile is and how it applies to the software development process.

The next section focuses on portfolios: project, resource, and asset. By applying agile techniques to these areas of your development process, the author explains how users can gain efficiencies and help the management team make better decisions in areas such as choosing projects, training and retaining resources, and managing your company's existing applications. This breakdown is helpful even for those already working in agile environments.

The final section of the book gives an overview of Scrum (a popular selection of agile practices), detailing its roles and activities. The author also gives some advice on avoiding the pitfalls often faced when development shops try to manage agile resources with traditional project management techniques.

As a QA manager working in an environment that recently adopted agile, I was able to immediately see some areas that we can improve upon utilizing the strategies in this book. The section on metrics for example offered several examples of measurement techniques that define the success of your project. I'll also be suggesting this book to members of our team who do not have agile backgrounds. For a project manager that's new to agile, this book gives provides a good overview and some helpful techniques for managing agile projects.

I enjoy reading this book. It is well written and has good transitions between topics. It touched on all of the areas I expected it to. It also covered one of the most important topics in agile—continuous measurement and evolution to drive improvement in your development processes. If I were to add anything, I might consider a section giving a little more detail on the available agile communities, standards, etc.