"Becoming agile in an imperfect world" by Greg Smith and Ahmed Sidkey, Book Review

Imagine that you are a manager at a large company, and you are dissatisfied with the traditional process. What you have now works, but it is slow, there is a lot of rework, projects slip (or you have to add too much slack to your estimates), and your superiors begin to think whether they should find someone else who can manage IT projects. All this of course is a fiction: you can be a developer, a manager, an owner, or anybody else involved in the software development project. You are still dissatisfied with what you do and want to deliver much needed quality software on time and within budget.

This book is a field manual on how to achieve such noble goals:
1. You will learn how to transition to the state of paradise without sinking the ship.
2. You will learn how to develop an efficient and productive software development process.
3. You will learn how to maintain and perfect this process.

This book is quite unique. It is written in a form of a 5-day training course. I am usually not a fan of such a writing style, but I think that "Becoming agile..." is an exception. It's about a software process and as such requires a lot of case studies, group exercises (or at least what a book format allows), and therefore the training course style is perfect to facilitate learning.

And now, a couple of words about Agility. The authors focus on one specific methodology: Scrum. They argue that some variation of Scrum is perfect for a company that is just starting on the path of Agile Development, because it, perhaps, is the easiest to start with: its is the most flexible and does not require as immediate and dramatic changes in the management and development behaviors as XP or Lean. The authors are perfectly right. I would, perhaps, go a little further and instill a sort of a simultaneous Scrum/XP hybrid advocated by some other agilists, but I also realize that it is most important to get everybody's Buy-In, and as such, tearing down all the walls at once may not be the most productive approach.

I read this book in its original, unedited (MEAP) form. There were, obviousely, a couple of rough corners, but the book was written so well, that I would not have noticed have I not been watching for them. I think that the book is great for its target audience, and if you are a part of that audience, I hope that you would find that too.

Vlad