Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Every fifteen years or so, a great book pops up that describes what
projects are really like. There was Brooks, then DeMarco and Lister,
and now there's Cockburn.
Why is there such a gap between these great books? Possibly because
the message they contain isn't the easy-to-digest dictate: "run your
project this way and everything will be fine." Instead these books all
focus on the fundamentals of projects: people and the way they work
together. These books treat people as people, and not replaceable
parts in a process. The books accept people's foibles and
inconsistencies, and work out how to work with them, rather than how
to try to stamp them out. The books ask: how can we help these funky
people work better together to produce great software?
Agile Software Development has some great answers, which makes it a
significant book. It deals with the issue that programming is
essentially communicating. It looks at the success factors of
individuals, and how to help align the project with these. It
discusses practical ways to reduce the latency of communication (do
you know how much each extra minute taken finding things out costs on
a 12 person project? How do you line your walls with information
radiators?) The book mines the metaphor of development as a
cooperative team game, and looks at development organizations as a
community, where good citizenship pays.
So how _do_ you organize all these people, these team players, these
citizens? The answer is with methodologies. But not with something you
buy off-the-shelf. Cockburn argues that teams should work to define,
and then refine, their own methodologies, bringing in standard ones
where they fit. To help the teams, he has a wonderful section
describing what methodologies _are_, and how to build them. This is
good, solid, practical advice. He talks about when it's good to be
light, and when you need to be heavier, when laissez-faire works, and
when you need ceremony to reduce risks. Then, not content with helping
you create a methodology, Cockburn explains how to adapt what you have
to a changing world.
If you work in or with a team developing software, then you owe it to
yourself (and your team) to read this book. You'll come away with a
far clearer understanding of the dynamic at work in your team, and
with lots of ideas for improving it. And that's the whole point.
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Lightweight methodologies are exploding in popularity because their flexibility is ideal for today's fast-changing development environments. In Agile Software Development, legendary software expert Alistair Cockburn reviews the advantages and disadvantages of lightweight methods, synthesizing the field's key lessons into a simplified approach that allows developers to focus on building quality software rapidly, cost-effectively, and without burnout. Ideal for managers seeking to transcend yesterday's failed approaches, the agile movement views software development as a cooperative game. As players move throughout the game, they use markers and props to inform, remind, and inspire themselves and each other. The goal of the game: to deliver a working software system -- and to use the lessons of each project to build a new, smarter "game" for the next project. For every IT executive and manager, software developer, team leader, team member, and client concerned with building robust, cost-effective software.
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