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I just finished reading The Art of Agile Development
by James Shore and Shane Warden. I picked up the book because I wanted to find out more about agile development. I hear a lot of terms thrown around the office about scrum processes and agile development. However, as I paid more attention to the activity within the work place I started to question the validity of our processes as being “agile”.

A scrum meeting which pushes almost an hour in time does not fit the definition of a stand-up scrum meeting. Developing formal requirements and functional specification documentation up front and scheduling around those processes fit in the “traditional” waterfall methodologies rather than agile methodologies. It seems to me that we are practicing traditional waterfall methodologies and masking it behind scrum terminology. I think there is room for improvement in our development processes and I want to learn as much as I can to help improve the process and speed up development.

The book provided exactly the information I was seeking. It’s loaded with information and thoroughly covers the entire software development process focusing on Extreme Programming (XP) methodologies. The XP lifecycle includes all the phases of the traditional software development life cycle (SDLC) of planning, analysis, design, code, test and deploy but eliminates formal documentation and reorganizes the phases into more efficient processes through the use of face-to-face collaboration, incremental design and parallel task execution.

XP emphasizes pair programming, test-driven development (TDD), iterative design, an open, collaborative workspace, and on-site customer support (e.g. Product Manager or other team members who are able to provide real requirements). The authors walk you through adopting XP practices from planning workspaces, pair programming techniques, handling changing requirements and team organization along with commentary on alternatives to XP methods.

If you are interested in XP, or agile development in general, and want to get a solid understanding of how to work in or create an agile team this is the resource. I highly recommend it.

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