“I really like the book; I think it is an excellent summary of the pertinent aspects of using agile development practices in the real world. It does a great job of uniting related ideas from different methodologies that often have dissimilar terminology, and then explains their characteristics in a consistent and clear way.”

­Mike Griffiths, Senior Technical Director, Quadrus Development, Inc.

Have your software projects been suffering from the age-old development problems of slipped schedules and ballooning budgets? Has your development organization experienced a variety of failed and canceled projects? If so, you may benefit from infusing some agility into your development process. Agile development breaks with a 40-year tradition of applying ever more structure and formalization to the design and development of software by advocating a return to the basic principles of satisfied customers, working software, and the willingness to accept and respond to change. As the popularity of agile development has grown, IT professionals have begun to struggle with ways to integrate agile practices and processes into traditional project environments. Integrating Agile Development in the Real World provides programmers and managers with specific and implementable ways to use agile processes in everyday software development projects. Whether read cover-to-cover, or used as a field guide during an agile transition, this book provides valuable insight into how agile practices and processes may be applied in almost any environment. Everything from how to deliver a working system sooner, acknowledge and respond to change, better meet the needs of the project’s customer, to increasing software quality, and fostering a more communicative and collaborative team culture are thoroughly covered.

Features

• Explore topics like refractoring, blitz planning, scrum meetings, and side-by-side programming that can be applied immediately rather than theory or idealized applications of agile development
• Find dozens of tips and techniques to help foster more communication and collaboration within teams, and between teams and customers, users, stakeholders, and management
• Learn to initiate, plan, execute, track, and report status on an agile project

AGILE PRACTICES AND TECHNIQUES COVERED

* Acceptance Testing
* Agile Data Management
* Automated Deployment
* Automated Unit Testing
* Blitz Planning
* Build Automation
* Burn Up Charts
* Collective Ownership
* Collocated Team
* Continuous Integration
* Daily Scrum Meeting
* Information Radiators
* Iteration Zero
* Metaphor
* Mock Objects
* ObjectMother
* Onsite Customer
* Pair Programming
* Planning Game
* Refactoring
* Short Iterations
* Side-by-side Programming
* Simple Design
* Small Releases
* Solution Sheets
* Stand Up Meeting
* Sustainable Pace
* Task Cycle
* Test Driven Development
* User Stories
* Wall Work Queue

Peter Schuh (Chicago, IL) has held virtually every position on a software development project team, including project manager, programmer, DBA, business analyst, technical writer, and account manager. Most recently, he has managed IT projects in the leasing, healthcare and e-commerce fields. He has written and spoken about the integration of agile processes into non-agile project environments, Extreme Programming, and agile development's impacts upon database administration.