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 and information 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

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 34 Ratings

Great for starting and tuning - 2009-06-23
Reviewer Rating:
If you are starting to agile methodologies but don't know where to start from this is it. It takes you from what is the motivation behind agile to how to practically live with it. And in the end how to tune it to suit your extreme needs.

The book is about extreme programming mostly but does not limit its scope to there. Other houses of agile community will also find this book practical and to the point. It explains every concept with golden words without putting unnecessary keywords to expand book's page size. It is brief and useful at best.

Also, it's like a patterns book. Authors have put a tiny box on each subject to other related subjects. This advances your mind links for each topic.

The tips coming from authors' real life experiences and also contains further references to other books and articles in case you are in need to receive more information.

I recommend this book for new comers to agile and experienced people who wants to tune their practices to their extreme cases.

Reading Is Painful, Repetetive and Choppy - 2009-11-02
Reviewer Rating:
I just can't stand reading this book. Being an SCM manager I am familiar with the good ideas and the problems of agile development. I am also familiar with the managers who like to use catch phrases to motivate and fix every issue with development.

This book is great training if you want to just spit out a bunch of buzzwords in agile programming but not really understand them. The first 200 pages of the book are literally a maelstrom of agile "buzzwords" broken up into recommendations of XP (extreme programming).

One thing that is repeated for every single XP practice is the following "THIS_PRACTICE is a prerequisite for agile (or XP) but if you can not THIS_PRACTICE you can still be effective... and here are alternatives... contraindications.." Ok, first off, if you have an idea or set of practices to improve programming, stick to you guns. With all the alternatives and wishy washy commitment in the writing of this book, I would conclude that the idea of XP is not that good in the first place.

The structure of the book is painfully chopped up into small pieces and the exact same concepts, practices and advice are repeated over, and over, and over!!!! Its maddening. Each chapter is also padded with all of the "if you can't do this..." sub-chapters which like most of the book just repeats the same conceits. There are many good points in the book but its simply not interesting to read. It reads more like a huge power point presentation. Touching on hundreds of ideas and highlighting them. The treatement of each individual practice is simply too shallow to be thought provoking or entertaining in any way. I know programming practice is not sexy but it can certainly be engaging.

The best parts of this book are short anecdotes about the anthers experience and nods to other, much better reading material like "The Mythical Man-Month". I admit I could not suffer the entire book but I did read some of the later chapters and the writing style is just as fractured and annoying as 10 or so chapters I did read. The authors do appear to have a good understanding of agile practice but they are not that familiar with writing a well structured book.

My advice would be to look at other books on the subject of programming and managing software projects. This will give you a good background. This book is just a primer on XP and a poorly written one at that.

An excellent guide for the agile practitioner - 2009-05-22
Reviewer Rating:
James Shore and Shane Warden consolidate years of experience with agile practices based primarily on Extreme Programming (XP), which has long been considered a good set of engineering practices to compliment the management practices of Scrum. The specific practices are well organized, clearly explained, extensively cross-references and presented in an appealing "pattern language" format. The "Getting Started" section provides a solid foundation for understanding agile mechanics and even deciding if it is right for your situation. The "Mastering Agility" section gives a good description of the values and principles that make agile work. This makes a good concluding section because it provides a good roadmap for developing more agile maturity once you've had some success applying the specific practices.

Good Addition to my library - 2009-05-21
Reviewer Rating:
Having not been exposed to Agile, I found "The Art of Agile Development" a very good read. Shore and Warden described Agile practices in a way that was easy to read and more entertaining than I expected (compared to most of the technical books that I read). I believe they presented the practices very well. They also had answers and responses to my "but what about.." thoughts in the Questions and Contraindications section for each practice. I also appreciate the extensive list of References for further knowledge and reading. As the title says, I do find this a good addition to my library.

Great Reference for Agile Teams - 2009-05-20
Reviewer Rating:
I recently read The Art of Agile Development as part of an Agile book discussion group. I would recommend it to anyone active in Agile software development or anyone simply thinking about adopting XP with Scrum.

What were the biggest positive surprises found in reading the book?

Team member role ratios - The authors suggest as a rule of thumb to start with 2 on-site customers (including the product manager) for every 3 programers. He makes a very good point that if your programmers are your constraint, then it is very important to not bottle neck their efforts with wait time on "how should the software work" questions. There are also considerations of "waste" introduced by having to collect this information up front in documentation rather than relying on a back and forth discussion as needed.

Risk Management - The authors have pulled together the analysis of project release data from various sources and provide some ways to intellegently update initial release plan estimates to arrive at a risk adjusted release date. Most Agile references I am familiar with resist making this type of commitment and instead focus on changing the company culture to not require the commitment until you have enough data on the team velocity. While I believe the latter is MUCH more desireable, the authors at least recognize that this is not possible in some corporate cultures.

From the Agile newbie to the seasoned consultant, The Art of Agile Development offers plenty of fresh examples along with the underlying principles to help the reader master the art of successful software development.

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