Agile Adoption Patterns: A Roadmap to Organizational Success (Paperback)

Proven Patterns and Techniques for Succeeding with Agile in Your Organization

Agile methods promise to help you create software that delivers far more business value—and do it faster, at lower cost, and with less pain. However, many organizations struggle with implementation and leveraging these methods to their full benefit. In this book, Amr Elssamadisy identifies the powerful lessons that have been learned about successfully moving to agile and distills them into 30 proven agile adoption patterns.

Elssamadisy walks you through the process of defining your optimal agile adoption strategy with case studies and hands-on exercises that illuminate the key points. He systematically examines the most common obstacles to agile implementation, identifying proven solutions. You’ll learn where to start, how to choose the best agile practices for your business and technical environment, and how to adopt agility incrementally, building on steadily growing success.

Next, he presents the definitive agile adoption pattern reference: all the information you need to implement the strategy that you’ve already defined. Utilizing the classic pattern format, he explains each agile solution in its proper context, revealing why it works—and how to make the most of it. The pattern reference prepares you to

• Understand the core drivers, principles, and values associated with agile success
• Tightly focus development on delivering business value–and recognize the “smells” of a project headed off track
• Gain rapid, effective feedback practices: iteration, kickoff and stand-up meetings, demos, retrospectives, and much more
• Foster team development: co-location, self-organization, cross-functional roles, and how to bring the customer aboard
• Facilitate technical tasks and processes: testing, refactoring, continuous integration, simple design, collective code ownership, and pair programming
• Act as an effective coach, learning to engage the community and promote learning
• Integrate “clusters” of agile practices that work exceptionally well together

Agile Adoption Patterns will help you whether you’re planning your first agile project, trying to improve your next project, or evangelizing agility throughout your organization. This actionable advice is designed to work with any agile method, from XP and Scrum to Crystal Clear and Lean. The practical insights will make you more effective in any agile project role: as leader, developer, architect, or customer.

Foreword xxiii & xxvi

Preface xxvii

Acknowledgments xxxiii

About the Author xxxvii

Part 1: Thoughts about Software Development 1

Chapter 1: Learning Is the Bottleneck 3

Chapter 2: Personal Agility for Potent Agile Adoption 13

Part 2: Crafting an Agile Adoption Strategy 21

Chapter 3: Business Value 23

Chapter 4: Smells 29

Chapter 5: Adoptin