Book Review: The Art of Agile Development
I recently read The Art of Agile Development by James Shore and Shane Warden and thought I should write up a brief review here. Full disclosure: I participated in review draft chapters of the book as it was being written, and as a way of saying thanks, I received a courtesy copy of the book.
As I understand it, the book began its life as an updated, second edition of Warden's (a.k.a. chromatic) Extreme Programming Pocket Guide, but quickly grew in scope to become its own book.
There are many variations on agile development these days, and even variations on the Extreme Programming (XP )practices. The authors cut through all of that to choose a good, solid set of practices and present them as a way to get started with agile development that will work well enough to get to the point where you can start to learn and adapt on your own.
After presenting the case for agile development in Part I, the authors move into the meat of the book in Part II, where they present the various practices. For each practice, the authors explain the practice and how to do it, answer common questions about the practice, discuss the expected results of following the practice, and then discuss "Contraindications" - things that might be true in your situation that may make it difficult or impossible to introduce the practice. Often, they present alternative practices to work around these cases. Part III of the book is for the more experience agile development team. Once you've gotten good at the practices, you need to start learning and adapting to make agile development really work for you. Part III gets people started down that road.
While I don't agree with the authors on every point, I found the book very good overall. It gives an excellent introduction to the current wisdom of the agile development community, and there are lots of ideas to consider and think about here. I recommend it for any team that is doing, or thinking about doing, agile development.

