Book Image

The Agile Developer's Handbook

By : Paul Flewelling
Book Image

The Agile Developer's Handbook

By: Paul Flewelling

Overview of this book

This book will help you overcome the common challenges you’ll face when transforming your working practices from waterfall to Agile. Each chapter builds on the last, starting with easy-to-grasp ways to get going with Agile. Next you’ll see how to choose the right Agile framework for your organization. Moving on, you’ll implement systematic product delivery and measure and report progress with visualization. Then you’ll learn how to create high performing teams, develop people in Agile, manage in Agile, and perform distributed Agile and collaborative governance. At the end of the book, you’ll discover how Agile will help your company progressively deliver software to customers, increase customer satisfaction, and improve the level of efficiency in software development teams.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

The Software Industry and the Agile Manifesto

Towards the end of the last century, the software industry was in a state of turmoil. There were some significant software project failures, which were having a substantial reputational impact on the industry as a whole. One observation was that software projects over a certain size were more likely to fail.

In this chapter, we'll discuss the factors that led to a crisis and the subsequent major turning-point in the software industry. In the second part of this chapter, we'll introduce the Agile Manifesto and its origins and discuss the way it revolutionized the way we think about building software. We'll explain the Manifesto's values and principles, what they each mean, and the impact they have on how software professionals work.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Why the software industry needed to change
  • The origins of the Agile Manifesto
  • A detailed look at the values and principles of the manifesto and how they translate to today's context
  • Adaptive versus predictive planning
  • Incremental versus waterfall delivery
  • Agile isn't a process, it's a mindset built on guiding values/principles and requires solid technical practices