Presents the key practices of all Agile development approaches, offers overviews of specific techniques, and show how you can choose the approach that best suits your organization. Softcover.
i am a little sorry to not give this book five stars. this was a wonderful book for me, because it taught me some things about software that i didnt set out to learn. i never got the agile line "people over process" before, now i do.
there is a lot of very wonderful material in this book. its worth the read. the interviews are mostly excellent, and the case studies are all very interesting. his summaries of some of the major agile methodologies is good primer material.
some of the things that bugged me: he spazzes on and on about how the internet age has changed software forever, and about how software businesses will fail in this new fast-paced environment. this is about the biggest non-starter you could have for me to convince me to be agile. i work in research/academia, where these kinds of considerations are secondary. i also, personally, do not give a shit about "successful business". it is less than interesting. finally, i am anything but a "fast-paced" guy. but this has never stopped me from being a highly productive software developer.
the second thing that bugged me is that much of the book is repetitive, unfocused, and overly abstract. i many times found myself just pushing through large (10+ page) annoying sections of the book. i didnt skim, mostly out of respect for the author who really brought me a lot: a much much clearer understand of agile than i ever had, an attitude change about agile and software development practices in general, some good basic background on different agile methodologies, and some good interviews with some cool people.
The book is a bit boring at the first glance but it contains a lot of valuable business stories and real life Agile practices. It will put you inside the business as if you were part of the team and will give you a perfect insight about how Agile methodology help in the different business situations.