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Author/s : Jutta Eckstein
Publisher : Dorset House
Category : Project management, Process and Best Practices
Review by : Lasse Koskela
Rating : 8 horseshoes</pre>
Most other titles on Agile Software Development repeat the mantra
about lightweight processes and how they are only applicable for small
teams of a dozen or so. This book is different. It sets out to offer
the advice of someone who has been running software projects with over
hundred people using an agile process -- to help others succeed in the
same.
While there aren't any hard numbers and the like, a formula to make a
silver bullet, there's plenty of sound advice starting from structures
to help scale up an agile process, the challenges one will encounter
while scaling, and the peopleware issues evident in large, often
distributed projects as well as large companies in general, with all
the associated bureaucracy and policies. The discussions about
building teams around features versus components, for example, and the
division into domain teams and technical service teams are useful
reading for someone facing such decisions.
Also, this book does not expect you to know the slang of agile
software development. It's written so that a manager familiar with
software development -- but not necessarily agile software development
-- has no problem understanding what the author is trying to pass on.
What's missing from this book -- something one might wish to get
support for, facing a larger than usual agile project -- is the deeper
coverage of techniques to facilitate things like emergent architecture
across a distributed development team. The project report from a
170-member software project was not quite as detailed as I would've
hoped. Detailed case studies are something I am personally very
interested in reading.
In summary, while the advice in this book is relatively abstract, and
you might think it doesn't have that much to offer if you are already
familiar with Agile Software Development in general, I would certainly
not dare to risk a large project by NOT reading this book.
More info at Amazon.com More info at Amazon.co.uk