Essential Skills for the Agile Developer

09/30/2011 · No Responses

Agile has become today’s dominant software development paradigm, but agile methods remain difficult to measure and improve. Essential Skills for the Agile Developer fills this gap from the bottom up, teaching proven techniques for assessing and optimizing both individual and team agile practices.

Written by four principals of Net Objectives—one of the world’s leading agile training and consulting firms—this book reflects their unsurpassed experience helping organizations transition to agile. It focuses on the specific actions and insights that can deliver the greatest design and programming improvements with economical investment.

The authors reveal key factors associated with successful agile projects and offer practical ways to measure them. Through actual examples, they address principles, attitudes, habits, technical practices, and design considerations—and above all, show how to bring all these together to deliver higher-value software. Using the authors’ techniques, managers and teams can optimize the whole organization and the whole product across its entire lifecycle.

Essential Skills for the Agile Developer shows how to

Perform programming by intention
Separate use from construction
Consider testability before writing code
Avoid over- and under-design
Succeed with Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD)
Minimize complexity and rework
Use encapsulation more effectively and systematically
Know when and how to use inheritance
Prepare for change more successfully
Perform continuous integration more successfully
Master powerful best practices for design and refactoring

Review
“I tell teams that the lean and agile practices should be treated like a buffet: Don’t try and take everything, or it will make you ill–try the things that make sense for your project. In this book the authors have succinctly described the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of some of the most effective practices, enabling all software engineers to write quality code for short iterations in an efficient manner.”
–Kay Johnson, Software Development Effectiveness Consultant, IBM

“Successful agile development requires much more than simply mastering a computer language. It requires a deeper understanding of agile development methodologies and best practices. Essential Skills for the Agile Developer provides the perfect foundation for not only learning but truly understanding the methods and motivations behind agile development.”
–R.L. Bogetti, www.RLBogetti.com, Lead System Designer, Baxter Healthcare

“Essential Skills for the Agile Developer is an excellent resource filled with practical coding examples that demonstrate key agile practices.”
–Dave Hendricksen, Software Architect, Thomson Reuters