Once upon a time, software projects were industrial endeavors akin to building a bridge or a ship: complex successions of activities ordered in a definite sequence, with little chance to go back and refine things before they were completed. At that time, however, the world evolved at a slower pace. Nowadays, both the business environment and life in general have become much more frantic and tumultuous. Consequently, the way of developing software must adapt, too. It becomes much more important to stay in constant touch with customers and end users, and to react to their changing needs and observations even before the software is fully operational.

Software development has become much more of a work in progress. As a result, new software development methods are needed--precisely what this book is all about. It presents a few methods in some detail, but mostly frames all of them in a common strategy called agile. It is made clear that agile may also be a set of processes, methodologies, practices, and tools, but first of all is a set of values and principles. In 24 chapters, this idea is supported by looking at the many facets of business and enterprise culture: from executive, employee, and customer engagement to building the new roles and responsibilities needed by these new methods; from building a scalable agile framework to measuring project completeness and success; and from achieving an agile mindset to spreading it to others by establishing agile education programs. The main agile methods (Scrum, extreme programming, Kanban, and lean software development) and practices, such as writing user stories, storing them in the backlog, and transforming them into working code with story points, velocity, and burndowns, are also presented. All of this is told in a very straightforward way.

This book is neither a textbook nor a tutorial on agile. It can almost be read like a novel or work of fiction, thanks to its very narrative, although a little emphatic, style. No difficult mathematical formulae are included, and the diagrams and figures are always very clear, although a little simplistic. References to previous, often seminal, work are always given at the right spots instead of being gathered at the end of the book. For all of these reasons, the book is more geared toward executives and project managers than software developers and technical people. It can even benefit the general public and anyone interested in keeping up-to-date with scientific and technological evolution.

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