This is the latest book published in the “Agile Software Development Series,” with Alistair Cockburn and Jim Highsmith as the series editors. The author aims to introduce to practitioners in the information technology (IT) community, especially business analysts (BAs), the agile mindset way of developing IT projects for various business applications. For those readers who are not familiar with the agile software development concept, here is one of the many possible definitions, which appears on the website for the book: the agile approach is the “collaboration among stakeholders to deliver value to customers in frequent increments with consistent reflection and adaptation” [1]. This is in contrast to the traditional waterfall approach in the system development process, with which many IT practitioners are familiar. However, in my opinion, even with the stated type of business applications, the agile approach should not be applied blindly to any IT project.

In the first part of the book, the author uses the first six chapters to present his ideas on capturing the many concepts and techniques of the agile approach for developing IT projects. The key chapter in this part is chapter 6, where the author discusses analysis with an agile mindset. The author proposes an approach for IT teams to answer four questions about the project in an iterative manner in order to come to a more suitable solution for the IT project. However, the fifth question asks whether the current type of IT project can be adapted to the agile approach.

He then further illustrates some of the more project-specific approaches by discussing four case studies in the second part of the book. These case studies were selected based on the author’s work experience in “product development in a variety of industries, including financial services, health insurance, performance marketing, human services, nonprofit, and automotive.” All four case studies are presented in the following manner: 1) an introduction to the project, 2) the need, 3) possible solutions (some projects can have multiple solutions), 4) the deliveries of values, and 5) lessons learned. It is interesting to see how these approaches are applied to different types of IT projects and how the end results can be different. It is important to point out that all these steps are iterative and should be repeated one or more times.

The author then uses the third part of the book to provide more details on agile mindset techniques by referring to the case studies. The most important chapter in this part is chapter 11: “Understanding Stakeholders.” Here, the author introduces the techniques of stakeholder and user analysis, stakeholder map, user modeling, and persona, which is a specific description and characterization of a specific user. All five chapters in this part should be useful for the practitioners and BAs when applying agile approaches to their own IT projects. It is my opinion that more types of IT applications should be selected to show the applicability of the agile approach.

Finally, the resources part of the book contains a good glossary for all of the terms used, a summary of all of the references in each chapter, and a fairly good index. In my opinion, this is a good reference book for IT practitioners and BAs who want to use the agile approach for project development.

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