InfoQ Book Review: Agile Adoption Patterns

Posted by Deborah Hartmann on Jul 24, 2008 10:14 AM

Community

Agile

Topics

Delivering Value,

Agile Techniques,

Adopting Agile

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Scrum,

Antipatterns,

Patterns and Practices,

XP,

Introducing Agile

The Agile movement is no longer in its infancy.  For years teams have been adopting Agile practices with various degrees of success.  Ryan Cooper picked up Agile Adoption Patterns: A Roadmap to Organizational Success by InfoQ's own Amr Elssamadisy and gives this book a very positive review stating:

This book belongs on the bookshelf on anyone who is interested in helping a traditional software organization make an effective transition to a more agile way of working.

Ryan gives an overview of the different parts of the book:

• Part I expresses two guiding principles for agile change agents: ... Learning is the Bottleneck, and Personal Agility.
• Part II is perhaps my favourite part of the book. It does something no other book about agile practices that I've seen does: it explicitly maps various "business values" (that is, goals such as "Reduce Time to Market" and "Increase Quality to Market") to the agile practices that help reach that goal and deliver that value.
• [Part III is] The Patterns section contains patterns for all of the most common agile practices used in the field.
• [Part IV is] The third section of the book contains two real-world case studies of agile adoption efforts.

Finally, Ryan concludes that this book isn't for everyone, but:

However, if you have read enough about agile software development to pique your curiosity, but don't know where to start, this book is for you. If you have a basic understanding of agile practices but don't feel confident enough to be the "agile expert" on your team, this book is for you. If you're working on an agile team and feel you're not getting as much benefit from the agile practices you're using as you would like, this book is for you.

Agile Adoption Patterns: A Roadmap to Organizational Success looks to be a great addition to the Agile library and especially useful to those on the road to adopting Agile practices.

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   Others who have read the book say...

   Jul 22, 2008 4:25 PM by Amr Elssamadisy

   First of all thanks Ryan for taking the time to read the book! If anyone is interested in seeing what others have said about the book: Keith Braithwaite also gave his two cents after reading the book. Christopher Avery recommends the book also (ok, so as Ryan noted, chapter 2 is based on Avery's work - which is really good stuff). Jim Holmes very kindly lets us know what he thinks of the book.

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   Chapter 5 sample now available

   Jul 24, 2008 12:01 PM by Amr Elssamadisy

   The chapter that Ryan highly recommends - the one with the mappings from business values to Agile practices is now available for download at InformIT. Just click on the "Sample Content" tab. Enjoy!

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