The folks over at Manning.com asked me to do a review of the upcoming book “Becoming Agile” by Greg Smith and Ahmed Sidky. Thanks for giving me the opportunity!
Currently there are a lot of books on getting the Agile message across. Books would either specialize in a specific area: technical (Unittesting, Continuous Integration, Refactoring) or on the process (Scrum, Crystal, Estimation Techniques). Personally I found most books interesting in their niche. So why this book then? Well it’s the first book that I read that would take an method and tool agnostic way and would still describe the whole cycle from first assessing your company for agility and keep up after the first introductions.
It is not the usual clean room implementation but a book with insightfull proven experience. Sometimes even as bold as to challenge the current way of looking of things. Two things caught my attention:
- they have detailed way of assessing your agility before your start implementing agile in the company. This is often overlooked when Agilistas get overexcited and just start. Here you will find clues of getting the buyin from the people playing the numbers. The tool is called Dr. Agile and is available online at http://www.dragile.com.
- second thing is a framework called Sidky Agile Measurement Index (SAMI). Another way of measuring your agility and seeing the grow path to it. More on this at http://www.agilejournal.com/content/view/441/76/
Its release will around February 2009, and I'm looking forward to it.