The Art of Agile Development | 
 enlarge | Authors: James Shore, Shane Warden
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $30.09
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New (33) Used (7) from $30.09
Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 39339
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 438
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 0596527675
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.1
EAN: 9780596527679
ASIN: 0596527675
Publication Date: October 26, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The Art of Agile Development contains practical guidance for anyone considering or applying agile development for building valuable software. Plenty of books describe what agile development is or why it helps software projects succeed, but very few combine information for developers, managers, testers, and customers into a single package that they can apply directly. This book provides no-nonsense advice on agile planning, development, delivery, and management taken from the authors' many years of experience with Extreme Programming (XP). You get a gestalt view of the agile development process, including comprehensive guidance for non-technical readers and hands-on technical practices for developers and testers. The Art of Agile Development gives you clear answers to questions such as: How can we adopt agile development? Do we really need to pair program? What metrics should we report? What if I can't get my customer to participate? How much documentation should we write? When do we design and architect? As a non-developer, how should I work with my agile team? Where is my product roadmap? How does QA fit in? The book teaches you how to adopt XP practices, describes each practice in detail, then discusses principles that will allow you to modify XP and create your own agile method. In particular, this book tackles the difficult aspects of agile development: the need for cooperation and trust among team members. Whether you're currently part of an agile team, working with an agile team, or interested in agile development, this book provides the practical tips you need to start practicing agile development. As your experience grows, the book will grow with you, providing exercises andinformation that will teach you first to understand the rules of agile development, break them, and ultimately abandon rules altogether as you master the art of agile development. "Jim Shore and Shane Warden expertly explain the practices and benefits of Extreme Programming. They offer advice from their real-world experiences in leading teams. They answer questions about the practices and show contraindications - ways that a practice may be mis-applied. They offer alternatives you can try if there are impediments to applying a practice, such as the lack of an on-site customer. --Ken Pugh, Author of Jolt Award Winner, Prefactoring "I will leave a copy of this book with every team I visit." --Brian Marick, Exampler Consulting
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 An extremely practical guide to extreme programming August 10, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book has three parts in it - introduction to agility, guide to extreme programming and afterthoughts. You may want to read this book if you want to set up XP in your team or participate in it. It is mostly beneficial for the developers or project managers to read it.
The first part (Getting Started) is about 40 pages long and just puts you on the right track by discussing what agility means and introducing you to extreme programming. Here is where the authors explain how to determine whether XP is right in your case, what prerequisites are needed and what steps need to be taken to start.
The second part (Practicing XP) takes most of the book, some 300 pages and contains detailed guide to extreme programming. This is where all the XP practices are explained one by one. Each is given a big chapter - Thinking, Collaborating, Releasing, Planning and Developing. Inside each chapter, there is a detailed explanation of the relevant practices.
The last part (Mastering Agility) is again on the smaller side, it takes 40 pages and contains assorted advices along the "rules are there to be broken" lines. Afterthoughts to help you improve XP once you think you have mastered it.
It is therefore safe to say that the book is essentially a guide to XP, and a good one too. The writing style is excellent - information is organized in half a page long self-contained chunks, each chunk covers some concept or answers some question. Because of this, it is really easy to follow the material.
Even better, each chapter is closed with mandatory sections Questions, Results, Contraindications, Alternatives. Questions are indeed short Q&A and the questions were real-life, more often than not I have found mine answered. Results explain what exactly comes out of the discussed practice. Contraindications explain what obstacles there could appear. Alternatives explain what to do whenever you cannot use the discussed practice. Very realistic and informative.
There were a few imaginary tales from the field. You know, the ones that go like
- "We use XP here", said Alice.
- "Wow !", said Bob.
I don't generally like such stories, they make me feel stupid and therefore in my opinion the book (just like any other) could have got without them better. But this is just me.
An extremely practical guide to extreme programming.
My favorite Agile Development book June 9, 2008
I have about a dozen books on Agile and Lean development and this rapidly became my favorite.
Why: It's advice at the level I can use. Clear solid explanation and methods to understand what to do, what not to do, and most important, why.
It's just incredibly easy to read and use.
I've already bought 2 more copies to share with friends!
Best book on XP practice March 25, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In my opinion, this is the best book for someone starting to implement XP. Before this book, other two books on XP practice were "XP applied" and "XP installed".
Book by James Shore and Shane Warden provides more broad coverage, then previous books, and contains a lot of good advice, what to do, what not do, and how to do what should be done, while going to the path of Agility.
Presentation is based on the XP, but book also shows a more wide perspective, and contains comparison with SCRUM
What I really like in the book
-Pragmatic approach to XP - In this book, you will not see approach XP as a holy grail - do it either this way, or you are wrong. Instead, authors expand the original definition of the XP from XP Explained by the practices, which they found to work well in real world
-Its practical focus - It contains a lot of the practical tips (for example, how to implement continuous integration successfully, how to do test-driven development, what is the real meaning of the user stories etc..)
-Balanced presentation - for each practice there is Q&A section, contraindications and alternative practices.
-Live style - book is written in clear and engaging language
Quality of book is very high, and I would recommend it to my friends as a best book to read on working in agile/XP style
Great book on Agile development March 20, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is very well written and gives a great description of many different types of Agile practices. Although the book centers around XP, I think many of the techniques and practices could be brought over to any of the different Agile disciplines. The book also goes into the all important steps of selling agile practices to those with the money: managers, directors, stake holders, and the customers. This is a very important step! The book is also nice in that it doesn't necessarily have to be read in chapter order. If you need some help on something, it's easy to pick up the details by just going straight to that section - no need to read everything before it to get caught up. All the information in the book can be applied directly. Many of the concerns related to starting up Agile development in a shop are covered very well.
 Missing experimental results March 13, 2008
3 out of 18 found this review helpful
After reaching 100 pages I felt really disappointed. I was looking something more similar to "Beautiful code" but about management. I have found a book without facts and measures but "tips". I think that we [developers, project managers and other animals] should try to move our profession towards a scientific discipline (i.e. hypothesis-measure pairs).
I was looking for something either like "Mythical man-month"/"Peopleware" or the IEEE articles "voice of evidence". I didn't found any of those.
I do not need any tips but real evidence about what development strategies are good/bad and in which conditions. Real data please.
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