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The Business Value of Agile Software Methods: Maximizing Roi With Just-in-time Processes and Documentation Review"The business value of agile software methods" is an important book. It takes existing research in the return of agile methods and tries to quantify them into different financial measures. However, I personally was not a big fan of the book as it all felt a little too good to be true. Next to that, the book contained some parts that, in my opinion, are clear misunderstandings about Agile methods. I'll mention some of these at the end of this review.
The book is only about 200 pages and contains 24 short chapters. The initial chapters provide an overview of agile methods, different types, their history and some of the different practices. Chapter 11 does an ... rather interesting... comparison of different agile methods. Chapter 12 discusses what kind of metrics would be applicable for measuring agile methods and why they are different from traditional methods.
Most of the research work starts in chapter 13. This chapter summarizes the results of different agile development surveys that were done. Then chapter 14 introduces cost/benefits of Agile methods (on which the further calculations are based). These are done for five groups "pair programming", "test-driven development," "Extreme Programming," "Scrum," and "Agile Methods (in general)". Chapter 15 discusses the different metrics that will be calculated in Chapter 17-22 which are Cost, Benefit, ROI, NPV, and Real Options Analysis. All chapters show an enormous ROI for implementing agile methods. Chapter 22 summarizes the earlier chapters, 23 does a comparison with traditional methods (CMM) and 24 is a closing chapter that speculates about the future of Agile methods.
When reading this book, I had a couple of annoyances, a couple wrong things, and a couple metrics that seem unbelievable to me.
I'll start with some annoyances. The book is extremely repetitive--it could probably have written in 20% of the current text. The most annoying repetition was the sentence "Agile methods use right-sized, just-enough, and just-in-time x to maximize business value." This sentence is repeated over and over again. I'm not a fan of this kind of popular language, but the repetition made it much worst. Other annoyances were minor. For example the author keeps repeating that a Scrum cycle is 30 days, but then in the Scrum explanation says 2-4 weeks (which is more common nowadays).
Then some misinformed sentences. The description of test-driven development was shallow and missed the design aspect of TDD. For example, the authors state (p38) "test-driven development is a form of dynamic analysis, quality assurance, and verification and validation"... completely missing the -driven part. Similarly, the practice of simple design is not explained well (p51). The authors state that simple design relates to having the fewest number of methods and classes whereas, in my experience, simple design often lead to more methods and classes... just a lot smaller ones. More serious, on p79, the authors propose methods related to working software... but not of the proposed metrics relate to... working software. Instead they suggest metrics such as iteration size, iteration frequency, operational/validated iterations (no clue what that means).
Then to the disbelieve. My first observation was that all the ROI metrics were very positive. For example the ROI of pair programming is 1500% !! I pair program often, enjoy it, and think it has a positive ROI... but 1500% sounds a little high to me. I don't have the facts to challenge this number, its the only number I've seen... it just seems too good to be true. Which does brings me to the subject... it was a little unclear to me what data this was based on.
Even with the above critique, this was not a bad book. Considering that the goal of the book was *not* to describe agile methods but to describe the research of the authors related to the ROI of Agile methods. In fact, this is an important job and will definitively help people who are not interested in knowing the details but need to make decisions on whether to try-out agile development or not. For that reason, I'll go for 3 stars. If you do not have the need to convince anyone with these numbers, then I would not recommend reading this book. If you do need to convince someone, then perhaps the ROI calculations in this book will help.
The Business Value of Agile Software Methods: Maximizing Roi With Just-in-time Processes and Documentation OverviewThe Business Value of Agile Software Methods offers a comprehensive methodologyfor quantifying the costs and benefits of using agile methods to create innovative software products and shows a complete business value comparison between traditional and agile methods. It provides a roadmap for linking agile methods tomajor industry standards such as the project management, systems, and software engineering bodies of knowledge and identifies a set of critical factors for succeedingwith agile methods every time.Key Features:--Identifies the major types and kinds of agile methods, along with the major forms of best practices, as a pretext for mixing and matching them to create super-hybrids--Introduces a complete family of metrics, models, and measurements for estimating the costs, benefits, return on investment, and net present value of agile methods, and includes numerous how to examples--Provides the first comprehensive compilation of cost and benefits data on agile methods from an analysis of hundreds of research studies, and introduces and illustrates the industrys first top-down parametric models for estimating agilemethods costs and benefits--WAV offers numerous free downloadable training and consulting briefings, cost and benefit spreadsheets, release planning templates, metrics for agilemethods, and an ROI/business value calculator available from the WebAdded Value Download Resource Center at jrosspub.com
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