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Integrating Agile Development
The book opens with a couple of chapters exploring exactly what it means to be an agile development team. The author doesn't spoon feed you a definition. Instead, he takes a look at the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and pulls from that a collection of values important to agile software development. A list of agile principles is presented, and each of these aspects is examined from the angle of what it's trying to accomplish and where it can help when building software.
At this point, the book introduces seven methodologies including The Crystal Methodologies, eXtreme Programming, and Scrum. Each approach is defined by their practices and focus. The author does a nice job of telling you where these methodologies excel and even where they don't. The approaches are contrasted, but not with an eye towards finding out who is right and who is wrong. Instead, the author digs for the strengths in each practice.
The next few chapters offer suggestions about what agile practices can do for your development team, and outline how to adopt a few agile practices. This is one of the many places where the book really shines, thanks to its realistic approach. The author knows that not everyone can run out, soak up some eXtreme Programming training, and convert their entire division overnight. If you can, great, but this book is more focused on people who don't meet certain agile requirements and others who just want to test the waters a little. For these groups, there is sensible advice like, "Start by doing X, Y, and Z, because they're great ideas, easy to implement, and will help you a lot." If you like those changes, the author suggests what to try next. Even better, you're told to back away from the changes you don't like, sprinkle in some ideas from other methodologies, and even customize the practices to your needs. That may not be as extreme as some agile developers would prefer you to be, but it is agile programming distilled down to what it can do for you personally. I found that to be a great touch.
With the introduction to this new world of software development covered, the book moves into detailing actual agile practices. Early chapters in this section focus on the programmer, testing, and even the database side of the operation. Later chapters get into management, the project, and an agile development cycle. When a practice is defined, you're warned of prerequisites you should have in place before considering it, offered advice for how to get started with it, and even given a few variations that might work better for your group. I wouldn't say that the detail here is sufficient to teach you all you need to know, instead this section arms you with the knowledge to decide what you should be looking into. To kick-start your research efforts, a practice always ends with a list of further resources, available both online and in print.
The final chapters of the book get more abstract, dealing with customers, communication, and even just people. There's a lot of sound advice hidden away in these pages for some difficult challenges. I personally learned a lot about how agile development deals with customers and I have a few new ideas I'm anxious to try on my clients.
As an added bonus, the book has a very nice layout, filled with intelligent, witty prose and good looking charts. These effects are always subtle but can make a text a lot more approachable. I believe my only complaint was that the author tends to throw around acronyms assuming you know what they stand for. I think he even eventually got around to defining all but a couple, but not always when you first encounter them. A glossary probably could have helped in this case.
In summary, this book is agile programming for everyone. As a one-man operation, common practices like pair programming aren't even an option for me. The author knows that the methodologies aren't one-size-fits-all, and really focus on exactly what they can do for you, whatever your own needs may be. If you don't follow any development strategy (hope that's not true), would like to know more about the agile practices without joining a cult, or even just want to stay sane in your traditional software development company, Integrating Agile Development in the Real World will give you plenty of fresh ideas.
You can purchase Integrating Agile Development in the Real World from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
enough to get FP. Eat it!
I've been using Agile since 92 when we used to do 16-bit real-mode development on Windows 3.1. It has been a fabulous development environment and its IDE is at the top of the line, especially when it replaced their old ISA system circa 95.
.NET under Windows 2003.
All things considered it's very akin to
The other improvement I've seen with Agile in the last year, is it's 64-bit compiler which was improved due to USDA requirements.
Which is nice.
Arise 'Sir' Bill: Gates Knighted
5 .htm
From:
http://www.telecomweb.com/news/110979026
"Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates today was made a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.
The award was bestowed because "Microsoft technology has transformed business practices, and (Gates') company has had a profound impact on the British economy," British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had said in a statement last year when the decision to honor Gates was announced. That statement was made in January 2004, and apparently it's taken that long to co-ordinate the schedules of Gates and the Queen.
There is one thing that Gates, who with $40 billion in the bank has enough cash to buy Buckingham Palace, or all of Camelot for that matter, can't buy - and that's the right to use the honorific 'Sir' in front of his name. That's reserved for citizens of the U.K. and Commonwealth nations. In contrast Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and widely considered the father of the Web, is allowed to. Sir Timothy, who last summer was named Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire (KBE), was born in London although he currently lives in the U.S.
Gates joins a long list of honorary knights that includes former U.S. Presidents Bush and Reagan, Steven Spielberg, Colin Powell, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and Bob Hope."
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a G5 Dual 2.5Ghz Machine w/ 1 GIG of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that
In addition, during this file transfer, Safari will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even SimpleText is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 2.5 Ghz Dual machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
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