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Agile anywhere : essays on agile projects and beyond
Hazzan O., Dubinsky Y., Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated, New York, NY, 2014. 72 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319101-56-9)
Date Reviewed: Jul 17 2015

A key part of agile is the ability to handle change. This book exemplifies this principle, being a refocused second edition of Agile software engineering [1]. The book’s central tenet is that “agility can be implemented anywhere.” Hence the book now treats agile not just as a software engineering approach, but as a broader approach toward project management and development more generally. As a result, the book’s content has been changed to discuss not just agile software engineering, but agile as “a lifestyle.” These changes are done with some success, though at times the content seems artificially stretched to fit this new definition, and generally the authors could have included many more examples to illustrate their points.

This short collection of essays is part of the “SpringerBriefs in Computer Science” series. The book mostly retains the original chapter structure from the previous edition, but with a few changes: the addition of a chapter reflecting on the change between editions; the promotion of the “Change” chapter from chapter 14 to chapter 4; the addition of a chapter on the Agile Manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/); and the removal of chapters on “Leadership” and “Delivery and Cyclicality.” This last edit means that “Reflection” is now the final chapter. Reflection is an appropriate final topic given the regular occurrence of reflective practices at the end of an agile iteration. I would, however, have liked to see a concluding chapter summarizing the book as a whole, which currently finishes in rather an abrupt way.

Each chapter of this book is constrained in length to six pages (occasionally four), structured similarly to academic papers. In an agile spirit of iterative software development, individual chapters partially represent a self-contained iteration--focusing on an issue of interest (though it is unclear if issues are tackled in order of priority), opening with an abstract setting the contents for that chapter, and closing with a summary describing (though not reviewing) the content.

Early on, the authors introduce their human, organizational, and technical/thematic (HOT) scale for a three-fold perspective on project development approaches. This is an interesting way of analyzing the different topics being discussed. The authors say the HOT scale was used extensively for analysis in the first edition. In this current edition, the authors could have made more use of this set of perspectives to link together the chapters. Currently, the book reads as a collection of independent essays, with little in the way of central threads running throughout. This is a missed opportunity in my opinion, as the topics under discussion (for example, “Time,” “Measures,” “Quality,” and “Trust”) often have clear interdependencies and links.

It is often the case when reading texts about agile that one can identify the specific agile method(s) favored by the authors; this book is no exception. Characterizations of agile as consisting of one- to two- week iterations, and emphases on practices such as whole teams sitting together, give away the agile method of extreme programming (XP)’s influence on the authors. Focus on XP in the authors’ previous work repeats this suggestion, but also underlines the authors’ history working with agile software development. With the move from “agile software engineering” to “agile anywhere,” the possible influence of software-specific XP practices is reduced. So a reader who is not keen on XP should find that XP influences do not pervade the current text in a distracting way (although some distractions do exist in the form of occasional typographic errors, which is somewhat disappointing for a second edition of a short book).

Although sometimes in need of more explanatory practical examples throughout each chapter, the change in content to focus this new edition on “agile anywhere” provides an innovative angle on agile. It is worth consulting if, independently of how Agile is implemented in specific practices for Scrum, XP, or other agile methods, you are interested in the principles of agile itself.

Reviewer:  Anna Jordanous Review #: CR143624 (1510-0853)
1) Hazzan, O.; Dubinsky, Y. Agile software engineering. Springer, London, UK, 2008.
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