This book from Craig Larman and Bas Vodde is a classic example of the fact that it is better to teach somebody to fish than to give him fish. It emphasizes that it is important to “be agile” more than to “do agile”. Approaches like Scrum or Lean are more frameworks to think about continuous improvement than tools that should be applied blindly like cooking recipes. The book will therefore tell you that “large-scale Scrum is Scrum” or that lean is not just kanban or waste reduction.

The goal of this book is to present good practices for software development that are based on OpenUP and RUP, but independently from these processes. The practices are grouped according to six principles:

Demonstrate value iteratively
Focus continuously on quality
Balance stakeholder priorities
Collaborate across teams
Elevate the level of abstraction
Adapt the process

This book from Mary and Tom Poppendieck helps to apply the lean manufacturing approach to the software development activities. After a presentation of the way Toyota designed its lean approach for manufacturing and product development, the book describes how these principles could be translated in the software development world. The main part of the book describes how the lean approach can affect elements of the software development process (value, speed, people, …). Finally, the authors provide a transition path to evolve towards a leaner approach.

In a period where the trend is to follow agile approaches with condensed guidance (see the 12 principles of the Agile Manifesto for instance), it could seem strange to publish a book on software development with more than 500 dense pages. You should however not be frightened by this book. Beneath the size and the structured form lies an approach based on practical experience that incorporates change and flexibility without abandoning the quest for precision and delivering value.

This book provides excellent material for a transition from a traditional approach to an agile method. The book gives only a brief description of the agile methods (XP, Scrum, FDD, etc.), but you will find a detailed presentation of the best practices common to agile approaches. For each of them, the author exposes the purposes, the …