Agile methods are just different than traditional approaches, kind of like Einsteinian physics is just different from Newtonian physics. They both have the same aims; they only have wildly different ways of getting there. Instead of estimating software schedules by reality-based values, agile creates abstractions like user stories, story points, and velocities to measure progress. Burndown charts project how quickly a feature set can be released. Maybe I’m an old fogey in the world of computer programming, but I still prefer reality-based metrics to predict our progress. Nevertheless, I’m not enough of an old fogey to be unwilling to learn new techniques that pervade all the software tools I use to manage my projects. In this book, Mike Cohn gives me an in-depth look at how these methods and tools function together.
The weirdest thing remains to me how abstract and detached from reality these tools are. They seem helpful in predicting teamwork on large projects, but I still question whether they are a panacea that requires their use everywhere. I can certainly see many situations where they can help estimations, but in a world which bills by the hour, such as my coders do, these abstractions don’t help as much. They can predict a launch date quickly without much effort, but they don’t provide a framework to break down the work so that a programmer can predict the amount of time that’ll be spent on a project. By enlightening me on the whole system, Cohn has given me more of a light to see how agile project-management methods can indeed bring about results better.
Agile techniques are here to stay in the software domain, and this book will continue to enlighten advanced practitioners and project managers how to measure progress going forward. They certainly reduce the amount of torque businesses can place on their developers and replace them with more creative fun that produces better results. Though twenty years old, Cohn’s book conveys these techniques in a way still relevant to today’s world. It’s worth reading to those involved in getting things done by creating software.
Agile Estimating and Planning
By Mike Cohn
Copyright (c) 2006
Pearson Education
ISBN13 9780131479418
Page Count: 330
Genre: Software Engineering
www.amazon.com