Integrating Agile Development in the Real World

This book provides excellent material for a transition from a traditional approach to an agile method. The book gives only a brief description of the agile methods (XP, Scrum, FDD, etc.), but you will find a detailed presentation of the best practices common to agile approaches. For each of them, the author exposes the purposes, the prerequisites, the implementation, the opportunities and obstacles. The books provides an agile treatment of many of the daily problems of software development projects like database management, data conversion, test data management, project communication, documentation, end-user contacts or developers management. The most interesting point for me in this book is that the author recognises that you cannot always start with a white page and require an "all-agile" process. It provides information on how to integrate gradually agile practices in a traditional software development context.

Peter's book is a great tool for helping you solidify your Agile practices. As a consultant, I've found it extremely beneficial for tweaking our Agile methodology. My clients that use it have appreciated the very practical and straightforward advice as well. Appropriate for BOTH managers and developers... ;)

Integrating Agile Development in the Real World is basically a manual on implementing Agile development in a real-world environment. The book is well written and clear. However, this book is not for the casual reader or developer. The "Who should read this book" section in the front says it best; it indicates that this book was written for someone who already has a strong understanding of Agile development (you can check the section out for specifics) and is wanting to attempt to implement it in their own development. Since Agile development is fairly flexible and can be applied to variety of disciplines, it also assumes you are familiar with one (for example, XP) and will be reading it with this in mind. If you aren't very familiar with these, this book is definitely not for you. If you are, then you could learn a lot from it. If you have some familiarity with one or more disciplines, however, this book could be used as a guide to adding Agile development to a development department's "toolbox". It is written from a wide-scale, departmental point of view and not intended for the solitary developer. I found some of the text to be a little too high-level and abstract to visualize. I normally feel very comfortable with the theoretical, but this book seemed almost a little too general. Again, this might be exactly what some others would want. A counter-argument could be made that should the book become too granular, it might become more of a "how to" book rather than a "why to" book. While it won't provide you the answer to your questions, it will provide the reader with the tools necessary to figure out for sure what questions your organization should ask. I also really liked how the book was divided. It provides very distinct sections, acknowledging that not all development tasks are the same. For example, there is a separate section for testing software (a subject near and....dear to my heart as a QA Engineer). This focus on testing is very much in tune with XP and test-driven development. So, overall, this is a good book. It's just not for the average programmer.

This book gives a project manager the "knowledge" needed to effectively manage a software product. The methods/processes defined by the author really work. I have first-hand experience that the project management techniques work and can bring a project to success, and on time.

This is a highly practical book. Having had the privilege of working with Author, I experienced first hand what short iterations and task lists can do for a project. This is a solid book with lots of useful information to kick start your software development projects.