Customer Reviews
Great springboard into Agile and XP. - By: R. Hart, 02 Apr 2008 
After reading a couple of books on Agile, The Art of Agile Development does the best job of presenting alll the ideas & concepts needed to start putting it alll into practice. Previously I've been left with questions about how to go about implementing certain ideas or mis-understood key concepts, I felt able enough to start putting a lot of Agile & XP concepts into practice straight away.
The material itself is very digestable & written in a great down to earth manner. Rather then being a case of teacher lecturing to their student, it felt a lot like someone who's been there & gone through alll the pains before hand, had come round to visit one afternoon to tell you what they had learnt & what they believe works best.
I've recommended this book to nearly alll my development friends & work colleagues/bosses in different departments & even offered to buy the skeptical one their own copy.
A warts and all account of Agile development - By: Hudba, 11 Jan 2008 I received this book then skimmed the authors biographies to see if they are web 2.0 hippies. My experience with the agile method is that is used to excuse sloppy work practises or when a developer wants to avoid boring stuff like documentation, requirements gathering, project planning or testing. I rank it along side similar claims such as graphic designers cannot arrive at work on-time & sober because artistic inspiration only strikes early in the morning in night clubs while talking to beautiful people. In short I don't understand it & it is what the cool people do.
My objectives of reading this book were to
Understand what agile Development reallly is.
Assess whether adopting agile methods will be of benefit to our team.
This book helped me partiallly achieve both of them quite easily so I recommend it.
My major reservation is that I'd appreciate more support for the book via a web site. James Shore has a good site but http://jamesshore.com/Agile-Book/
is the only page I could find about the book.
There was a checklist to determine how Agile are the work processes are that I use at the moment. I'd like this to be provided on a website & to be interactive.
The provision of more code examples & templates would be also useful.
The art of agile development does not evangelise or attempt to hard sell Agile. The case studies given seem contrived but are used by the authors give a warts & alll account of Agile development. On finishing reading this book I feel I am much more aware of the potential benefits & risks of this approach but not confident it's the right way to go.
This book plays the role of an honest consultant rather then a salesman. James Shore & Shane Warden are skilful writers & have covered a technical subject with élan. If you are anyway involved in software production & considering Agile, then buy it.
