Description

Agile done right gives managers a secret weapon to deliver great software that serves the needs of all business stakeholders.

The Agile Idea: Great management for great code explores the “why” behind Agile techniques, stripping back encrusted doctrine and jargon to reach Agile’s core principles. By building up an intuition about Agile, you’ll be equipped to choose, modify, and invent the right practices for your projects and teams. You’ll explore the foundational ideas in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, and build a new understanding of Agile that emphasises critical thinking over formulaic ritual.

Agile project management has a twenty-year track record of guiding software projects to completion. Unfortunately, when Agile methods like Scrum and SAFe are practiced without a deep understanding of their underlying principles, you end up with failed projects, disenchanted developers, and teams that are isolated from the rest of the company. The Agile Idea illuminates the core concepts that make Agile work so you can be an effective manager for software development.

TABLE OF CONTENT

1 Agile software development

• Every business a software business
• Managing a risky and creative activity
• Agile software development
• Agile is a response
• Agile is not infallible

2 Revolution and counterrevolution

• How managing software projects used to be done
• Key concepts in project management
• Visualization
• The art of systems analysis style project management
• Traditional project management is too brittle for software
• Software is a fundamentally different business activity
• Comparing Agile practices to predecessors

3 The people-part of agility

• Ancient projects and human cooperation
• The participants
• Software developers
• Senior management
• Project management
• Product management

4 Asking the right questions

• Adapting Agile
• Studying the dark arts
• The old scriptures
• Foresight and immovable objects
• Distilling requirements from early-stage descriptions
• Scaling requirements to the project setting

5 Tools and workflow

6 Risk management

7 Agility in product management

• Great product management is a large part of Agility
• Start with simplicity
• The art of listening to the customer
• Incrementalism is insufficient
• The hard but necessary work of product management

8 Agile and APIs

9 Effective planning and collaboration

• Iteration
• Moving tasks toward completion
• Task descriptions as a bulwark of project viability
• Estimating the size of a task
• Making meetings inclusive
• Has Agile been stretched

10 Milestones and management decisions