Book on Agile

[Cowboy Bob]

Some of the aspects of agile are extreemly useful

No, because when it comes down to it, the "aspects of agile" that are extremely useful are effectively just plain common sense and not exclusive to agile. That is why it's bollox. Because someone, somewhere has given plain common sense a label, then sold it as a brand. And all the sheep managers who have never seen a line of code or understand how development works in practice, buy into it all hook, line and sinker, spend thousands on "agile" training courses and books, yet never seem to be able to grasp that they've been sold a lemon. It's like selling a tin of air from Scotland for it's health benefits. Just go to Scotland FFS...

[Jason]

That is true.

However gotta have some way to sell common sense to managers, as most of them would not know it if it ran up and slapped them in the face with a wet kipper.

Plus. I make a lot of cash selling old ideas with the latest buzzwords.

[Jason]

Oh and common sense aint that common

EDIT: MM.. now I gotta figure out how to brand Tinned Scotish Air. Seems to me the american market would be best :P

[javalad]

No, because when it comes down to it, the "aspects of agile" that are extremely useful are effectively just plain common sense and not exclusive to agile. That is why it's bollox. Because someone, somewhere has given plain common sense a label, then sold it as a brand. And all the sheep managers who have never seen a line of code or understand how development works in practice, buy into it all hook, line and sinker, spend thousands on "agile" training courses and books, yet never seem to be able to grasp that they've been sold a lemon. It's like selling a tin of air from Scotland for it's health benefits. Just go to Scotland FFS...

Exactly.. I too feel that it is all common sense.... nothing spl about following particular... depending upon the scenario we can do things.. but they give a name and sell it..

most funny thing is advertising a developer role with Agile or scrum as important requirement.. at least it can be a essential for managers but not for developers...

[configman]

Whatever book you read it will probably quote the Chrysler 3 Project as the flagship of all Agile projects. What it will not say is that one year after development the project failed and had to be re-written as all the knowledge that had not been documented left when the project manager left the company.

Spend most of my time going to clients to remove Agile and put something proper in. Have never seen a "true" success story on Agile so far.

[sumo]

Spend most of my time going to clients to remove Agile and put something proper in.

What's that then?

Seems like DSDM has been pretty successful if the organisation has bought into it. I have only had opportunity to use sections of it with some success.

[swamp]

Agile isn't a methodology, it's a family of methodologies, a set of principles as such.

XP, Scrum, DSDM are all agile methodologies.

[grey_lady]

There's one other aspect to Agile which hasnt been mentioned here,
if you have continuous integration, and you only plan say 2 week iterations as you go along then your not working to an overall deliverable end date which probably doesnt go down with other people in a company.

Does that make sense? example would be a whole team sits down and looks at a prioritised list of features that a business has asked for, breaks it down into tasks and estimates the time for each task (post it notes on a wall normally :-) ) business type bod can see how many hours / units it will take for each task and in discussion with the team will decide which tasks are to be done (depending on how much time the team has available, say 1 full time dev might be productive for 6 hours a day etc)
at that stage no more planning needs to be done until the end of the 2/3 week iteration - good in that the business has a closer relationship with the devs (ideally all sat together) but probably doesnt help the rest of the business with their own planning.

Tis a fad me thinks :-)

[OverTheHill]

Agile books

I found the following resources useful for understanding what Agile/Scrum is all about:

http://www.crisp.se/henrik.kniberg/S...heTrenches.pdf

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...44396191025011

[someone has my name]

Agile is a hunk of Junk .. worked in an Agile Enviroment for a telecoms company.
Seemed more like passing the PM buck on to the developers.
endless meetings teleconfrences spent more time talking about development than on the actual developement...
most people working there thought the same!