Agile Adoption Patterns: A Roadmap to Organizational Success

Proven Patterns and Techniques for Succeeding with Agile in Your Organization

Agile methods promise to help you create software that delivers far more business value—and do it faster, at lower cost, and with less pain. However, many organizations struggle with implementation and leveraging these methods to their full benefit. In this book, Amr Elssamadisy identifies the powerful lessons that have been learned about successfully moving to agile and distills them into 30 proven agile adoption patterns.

Elssamadisy walks you through the process of defining your optimal agile adoption strategy with case studies and hands-on exercises that illuminate the key points. He systematically examines the most common obstacles to agile implementation, identifying proven solutions. You’ll learn where to start, how to choose the best agile practices for your business and technical environment, and how to adopt agility incrementally, building on steadily growing success.

Next, he presents the definitive agile adoption pattern reference: all the information you need to implement the strategy that you’ve already defined. Utilizing the classic pattern format, he explains each agile solution in its proper context, revealing why it works—and how to make the most of it. The pattern reference prepares you to

• Understand the core drivers, principles, and values associated with agile success
• Tightly focus development on delivering business value–and recognize the “smells” of a project headed off track
• Gain rapid, effective feedback practices: iteration, kickoff and stand-up meetings, demos, retrospectives, and much more
• Foster team development: co-location, self-organization, cross-functional roles, and how to bring the customer aboard
• Facilitate technical tasks and processes: testing, refactoring, continuous integration, simple design, collective code ownership, and pair programming
• Act as an effective coach, learning to engage the community and promote learning
• Integrate “clusters” of agile practices that work exceptionally well together

Agile Adoption Patterns will help you whether you’re planning your first agile project, trying to improve your next project, or evangelizing agility throughout your organization. This actionable advice is designed to work with any agile method, from XP and Scrum to Crystal Clear and Lean. The practical insights will make you more effective in any agile project role: as leader, developer, architect, or customer.

Foreword xxiii & xxvi

Preface xxvii

Acknowledgments xxxiii

About the Author xxxvii

 

Part 1: Thoughts about Software Development 1

Chapter 1: Learning Is the Bottleneck 3

Chapter 2: Personal Agility for Potent Agile Adoption 13

Part 2: Crafting an Agile Adoption Strategy 21

Chapter 3: Business Value 23

Chapter 4: Smells 29

Chapter 5: Adopting Agile Practices 37

Part 3: The Pattern Catalog 53

Chapter 6: The Patterns of Agile Practice Adoption 55

Chapter 7: Goal 61

Chapter 8: Cycle 65

Part 3.1: Feedback Practices 69

Chapter 9: Iteration 71

Chapter 10: Kickoff Meeting 77

Chapter 11: Backlog 81

Chapter 12: Planning Poker 87

Chapter 13: Stand-Up Meeting 93

Chapter 14: Done State 99

Chapter 15: Demo 103

Chapter 16: Retrospective 109

Chapter 17: Release Often 115

Chapter 18: Co-Located Team 119

Chapter 19: Self-Organizing Team 125

Chapter 20: Cross-Functional Team 131

Chapter 21: Customer Part of Team 137

Chapter 22: Evocative Document 143

Chapter 23: User Story 149

Chapter 24: Use Case 153

Chapter 25: Information Radiator 157

Part 3.2: Technical Practices 161

Chapter 26: Automated Developer Tests 163

Chapter 27: Test-Last Development 173

Chapter 28: Test-First Development 177

Chapter 29: Refactoring 183

Chapter 30: Continuous Integration 189

Chapter 31: Simple Design 197

Chapter 32: Functional Tests 203

Chapter 33: Collective Code Ownership 219

Chapter 34: Pair Programming 223

Part 3.3: Supporting Practices 229

Chapter 35: Coach 231

Chapter 36: Engage the Community 235

Chapter 37: Reading Circle 239

Chapter 38: Workshop 245

Chapter 39: Classroom Training 249

Part 3.4: The Clusters 255

Chapter 40: Agile Iteration 257

Chapter 41: Communication Cluster 263

Chapter 42: Evolutionary Design 269

Chapter 43: Test-Driven Development 277

Chapter 44: Test-Driven Requirements 285

Part 4: Case Studies 293

Chapter 45: BabyCenter 295

Chapter 46: Company X 305

Part 5: Appendices 321

Appendix A: Pattern to Business Value Mappings 323

Appendix B: Pattern-to-Smell Mappings 325

Appendix C: Getting the Most from Agile Practice Patterns 327

Appendix D: Further Reading 331

Bibliography 333

Index 339