This weekend I did read a book and I wanted to share my opinion about some issues in this blog. The book is called “Succeeding with agile” from Mike Cohn.
The book does not bring anything spectacular if you are familiar with Agile but it will give you some fresh ideas about several topics.
Below are the chapters that i found interesting.
Chapter IV describes useful tips how to spread good Agile practices inside the company; one way to achieve this is using improvement communities.
Chapter VI is in my opinion the most interesting chapter. The author dedicates a full chapter to the topic of “Overcoming Resistance”. He explains what kind of people most probably will be against the change, what kind of resistance they will show and simple tools to transform them into no resistors.
Chapter IX defines five topics to achieve technical excellence. Test driven development, Refactoring, Collective ownership, Continuous integration and Pair programming.
Chapter X talks about the team structure; this chapter is extremely interesting, it shows how teams should be assembled and present several studies showing how size of the team affects the productivity.
Chapter XIII gives an overview how to organize the product backlog and how to write good “user stories” with the respective acceptance criteria.
Chapter XVIII touches on a quite common topic nowadays: how to use apply Agile with distributed teams.
Chapter XIX presents situations where Agile needs to coexist with other approaches, for example CMMI or ISO9001. This chapter shows that several approaches can coexist.
Chapter XX describes very important topic; Agile methodologies cannot be implemented thinking only about development, the rest of the departments need to embrace the change, otherwise all the transformation will fail.
The book ends with a great chapter (Chapter XI) that presents some tools to evaluate the maturity of Agile in Team/Organization.
Hope this can be useful for you guys.
Cheers,
Luis
