Agile, Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP)

This book provides a set of essential thinking tools for understanding Agile adoption and transformation: how they differ and what you need to know to know to avoid being another statistic in the widespread adoption failure. In particular, you will learn how to use culture to work more effectively with your organization.

Agile Transition shares some fundamental knowledge to support many of the observations and conclusions that the authors have identified within organizations that have transitioned to a more agile approach to work. The authors share their failures and learnings in organizations transitioning to embrace agile, and they share their experiences of what is required to succeed

Real Life Scrum contains the most typical problems teams and organizations encounter when adopting Agile and Scrum. Organizations soon discover it is overly simplistic to say that 'Scrum by the book' is bad or that 'Scrum but' is a failure, since neither will get you very far if you do not understand why you are doing it and the actual tradeoffs you are making.

The tricky part to agile software development is that there is no manual telling you exactly how to do it. You have to experiment and continuously adapt the process until it suits your specific situation.

As more and more people move towards adoption of Agile practices, they are looking for guidance and advice on how to adopt Agile successfully. Unfortunately many of the questions they have such as: "Where do I start?", "What specific practices should I adopt?", "How can I adopt incrementally?" and "Where can I expect pitfalls?" are not adequately addressed.

This pocket book contains many exercises that you can use to do retrospectives, supported with the 'what' and 'why' of retrospectives, the business value and benefits that they can bring you, and advice for introducing and improving retrospectives.

The first principle of the Agile Manifesto is about "valuable software". Value is subjective; it's the perceived benefit we get from something. Imagine you are working for an IT department in a large organization. You want to deliver valuable software with iterative delivery. There might be dozens of stakeholders with dozens of definition of value. How do you ensure you are both "building the right thing" and "building the thing right"? Suppose you are increasing your productivity, you might be building the wrong product faster.

In my years as a software engineer, scrum master, and agile portfolio manager, it has been a combination of my experiences and implementing continuous improvement that have by far provided me with the most learning. The experiences have been both good and bad. They have involved mistakes by my colleagues and, more importantly, mistakes by me. I have found that our own mistakes are often the biggest wake-up calls of all. However, I have also learned that as long as we truly inspect and adapt, we always grow hugely from our mistakes. Bearing this in mind, this book contains seven short stories that will give you:

Certified Scrum Trainer and Coach Jim York says: Scrum is Simple. Doing Scrum is Hard. Many people I meet in organizations say that they find it hard to know how to get started with Scrum. Others have teams that are following some Agile practices, yet are far from becoming what Jeff Sutherland terms hyper-productive.

With this ebook, the ALM Rangers share their best practices in managing solution requirements and shipping solutions in an agile environment, an environment where transparency, simplicity, and trust prevail.

This is the definitive, realistic, actionable guide to starting fast with agile - and then succeeding over the long haul. It presents detailed recommendations, powerful tips, and real-world case studies drawn from his unparalleled experience helping hundreds of software organizations make agile work.

Expanding on The Core Protocols, this book is a roadmap for anyone who wants to lead or participate fully in the greatest team experience of their lives. It is short and practical, focused on implementation and tactics for making changes to bring about effective results fast.

Extreme Perl is a book about Extreme Programming using the programming language Perl. This site contains the entire book. Please send me your suggestions, questions, etc. to comments at extremeperl.org. You may also want to join the Extreme Perl Group at Yahoo! Groups to discuss Extreme Programming with Perl.