The Art of Agile Development

Most companies developing software employ something they call “Agile.” But there’s widespread misunderstanding of what Agile is and how to use it. If you want to improve your software development team’s agility, this comprehensive guidebook’s clear, concrete, and detailed guidance explains what to do and why, and when to make trade-offs.

In this thorough update of the classic Agile how-to guide, James Shore provides no-nonsense advice on Agile adoption, planning, development, delivery, and management taken from over two decades of Agile experience. He brings the latest ideas from Extreme Programming, Scrum, Lean, DevOps, and more into a cohesive whole. Learn how to successfully bring Agile development to your team and organization–or discover why Agile might not be for you.

This book explains how to:

• Improve agility: create the conditions necessary for Agile to succeed and scale in your organization
• Focus on value: work as a team, understand priorities, provide visibility, and improve continuously
• Deliver software reliably: share ownership, decrease development costs, evolve designs, and deploy continuously
• Optimize value: take ownership of product plans, budgets, and experiments–and produce market-leading software

Table of Contents

Part I. Improving Agility

1 What Is Agile?

2 How to Be Agile

3 Choose Your Agility

4 Invest in Agility

5 Invest in Change

6 Scaling Agility

Part II. Focusing on Value

7 Teamwork

8 Planning

9 Ownership

10 Accountability

11 Improvement

Part III. Delivering Reliably

12 Collaboration

13 Development

14 Design

15 DevOps

16 Quality

Part IV. Optimizing Outcomes

17 Autonomy

18 Discovery

19 Into the Future

About the Author

James Shore has been leading teams in practicing Agile development since 1999. He combines a deep understanding of Agile ideas with decades of in-the-trenches practical development experience. He uses this experience to help people understand how all aspects of Agile fit together to create outstanding results. James is a recipient of the Agile Alliance’s Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile Practice, host of many coding screencasts, and co-creator of the Agile Fluency Model. He may be found online at jamesshore.com.