Integrating Agile Development In The Real World

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.

Agile development advocates a return to basic principles of satisfied customers, working software, and the willingness to accept and respond to change. In this guide for programmers, managers, and agile development practitioners, Schuh, an IT project manager, tackles agile development challenges that occur no matter what agile methodology is used. The book is meant to serve both the cover-to-cover reader and the practitioner in the field who has time only to locate and read about specific topics as needed. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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.