This book is a practical guide for new agile practitioners and contains everything a new project manager needs to know to get up to speed with agile practices quickly and sort out the hype and dogma of pseudo-agile practices.The author lays out the general guidelines for running an agile project with the assumption that the project team may be working in a traditional environment (using the waterfall model, or something similar). Agile Development in the Real World conveys valuable insights to multiple audiences: For new-to-agile project managers, this book provides a distinctive approach that Alan Cline has used with great success, while showing the decision points and perspectives as the agile project moves forward from one step to the next. This allows new agile project managers or agile coaches to choose between the benefits of agile and the benefits of other methods. For the agile technical team member, this book contains templates and sample project artifacts to assist in learning agile techniques and to be used as exemplars for the new practitioner’s own project. For the Project Management Office (PMO), the first three chapters focus on portfolio management. They explain, for the agilists’ benefit, how projects are selected and approved, and why projects have an inherent "shelf-life" that results in hard deadlines that may seem arbitrary to traditional technical teams. What You Will Learn: How and why the evolution of project management, from PM-1 (prescriptive) to PM-2 (adaptive) affects modern 21st century project management. How sociology (stakeholder management), psychology (team dynamics), and anthropology (organizational culture) affect the way software is developed today, and why it is far more effective A clear delineation of what must to be accomplished by all the roles (PM, BA, APM, Developer, and Tester), why those roles are needed, and what they must do Step-by-step guide for a successful project based on studies and the author’s own experiences. Specific techniques for each role on the development team, both in the pre-iteration and iteration cycles, of product development. The appendices contain templates that the team could use or modify to tailor their own agile processes specific to the team, project, and organization.

Explore the latest Java-based software development techniques and methodologies through the project-based approach in this practical guide. Unlike books that use abstract examples and lots of theory, Real-World Software Development shows you how to develop several relevant projects while learning best practices along the way. With this engaging approach, junior developers capable of writing basic Java code will learn about state-of-the-art software development practices for building modern, robust and maintainable Java software. You’ll work with many different software development topics that are often excluded from software develop how-to references. Featuring real-world examples, this book teaches you techniques and methodologies for functional programming, automated testing, security, architecture, and distributed systems.

These are the proven, effective agile practices that will make you a better developer. You'll learn pragmatic ways of approaching the development process and your personal coding techniques. You'll learn about your own attitudes, issues with working on a team, and how to best manage your learning, all in an iterative, incremental, agile style. You'll see how to apply each practice, and what benefits you can expect. Bottom line: This book will make you a better developer.

For those considering Extreme Programming, this book provides no-nonsense advice on agile planning, development, delivery, and management taken from the authors' many years of experience. While plenty of books address the what and why of agile development, very few offer the information users can apply directly.

Agile is becoming ubiquitous, but many agile environments still aren't running smoothly. Successful agile implementation remains difficult, and organizations keep getting stuck on the same issues. That's where Real World Agility comes in. Leading agile expert and Scrum trainer Daniel Gullo has identified and addressed nearly 60 widespread challenges faced by individuals and teams trying to drive value from agile. Each solution is presented with maximum clarity and brevity, while covering everything you need to act effectively. Throughout, you'll find vignettes that show exactly how agile problems manifest in the real world -- and how Gullo's actionable solutions help you overcome them. Gullo addresses agile methods ranging from Scrum to Kanban, guides you on scaling agile to larger projects, and offers indispensable insight on applying agile beyond software development.

Your team is stressed; priorities are unclear. You're not sure what your teammates are working on, and management isn't helping. If your team is struggling with any of these symptoms, these four case studies will guide you to project success. See how Kanban was used to significantly improve time to market and to create a shared focus across marketing, IT, and operations. Each case study comes with illustrations of the Kanban board and diagrams and graphs to help you see behind the scenes. Learn a Lean approach by seeing how Kanban made a difference in four real-world situations. You'll explore how four different teams used Kanban to make paradigm-changing improvements in software development. These teams were struggling with overwork, unclear priorities, and lack of direction. As you discover what worked for them, you'll understand how to make significant changes in real situations. The four case studies in this book explain how to: Improve the full value chain by using Enterprise Kanban Boost engagement, teamwork, and flow in change management and operations Save a derailing project with Kanban Help an office team outside IT keep up with growth using Kanban What seems easy in theory can become tangled in practice. Discover why "improving IT" can make you miss your biggest improvement opportunities, and why you should focus on fixing quality and front-end operations before IT. Discover how to keep long-term focus and improve across department borders while dealing with everyday challenges. Find out what happened when using Kanban to find better ways to do work in a well-established company, including running multi-team development without a project office. You'll inspire your team and engage management to make it easier to develop better products. What You Need: This is a case study book, so there are no software requirements. The book covers the relevant bits of theory before presenting the case studies.

User experience (UX) design has traditionally been a deliverables-based practice, with wireframes, site maps, flow diagrams, and mockups. But in today’s web-driven reality, orchestrating the entire design from the get-go no longer works. This hands-on book demonstrates Lean UX, a deeply collaborative and cross-functional process that lets you strip away heavy deliverables in favor of building shared understanding with the rest of the product team. Lean UX is the evolution of product design; refined through the real-world experiences of companies large and small, these practices and principles help you maintain daily, continuous engagement with your teammates, rather than work in isolation. This book shows you how to use Lean UX on your own projects. Get a tactical understanding of Lean UX—and how it changes the way teams work together Frame a vision of the problem you’re solving and focus your team on the right outcomes Bring the designer’s tool kit to the rest of your product team Break down the silos created by job titles and learn to trust your teammates Improve the quality and productivity of your teams, and focus on validated experiences as opposed to deliverables/documents Learn how Lean UX integrates with Agile UX

Thoroughly reviewed and eagerly anticipated by the agile community, User Stories Applied offers a requirements process that saves time, eliminates rework, and leads directly to better software. The best way to build software that meets users' needs is to begin with "user stories": simple, clear, brief descriptions of functionality that will be valuable to real users. In User Stories Applied, Mike Cohn provides you with a front-to-back blueprint for writing these user stories and weaving them into your development lifecycle. You'll learn what makes a great user story, and what makes a bad one. You'll discover practical ways to gather user stories, even when you can't speak with your users. Then, once you've compiled your user stories, Cohn shows how to organize them, prioritize them, and use them for planning, management, and testing. User role modeling: understanding what users have in common, and where they differ Gathering stories: user interviewing, questionnaires, observation, and workshops Working with managers, trainers, salespeople and other "proxies" Writing user stories for acceptance testing Using stories to prioritize, set schedules, and estimate release costs Includes end-of-chapter practice questions and exercises User Stories Applied will be invaluable to every software developer, tester, analyst, and manager working with any agile method: XP, Scrum... or even your own home-grown approach.

Today, even the largest development organizations are turning to agile methodologies, seeking major productivity and quality improvements. However, large-scale agile development is difficult, and publicly available case studies have been scarce. Now, three agile pioneers at Hewlett-Packard present a candid, start-to-finish insider’s look at how they’ve succeeded with agile in one of the company’s most mission-critical software environments: firmware for HP LaserJet printers. This book tells the story of an extraordinary experiment and journey. Could agile principles be applied to re-architect an enormous legacy code base? Could agile enable both timely delivery and ongoing innovation? Could it really be applied to 400+ developers distributed across four states, three continents, and four business units? Could it go beyond delivering incremental gains, to meet the stretch goal of 10x developer productivity improvements? It could, and it did—but getting there was not easy. Writing for both managers and technologists, the authors candidly discuss both their successes and failures, presenting actionable lessons for other development organizations, as well as approaches that have proven themselves repeatedly in HP’s challenging environment. They not only illuminate the potential benefits of agile in large-scale development, they also systematically show how these benefits can actually be achieved. Coverage includes: • Tightly linking agile methods and enterprise architecture with business objectives • Focusing agile practices on your worst development pain points to get the most bang for your buck • Abandoning classic agile methods that don’t work at the largest scale • Employing agile methods to establish a new architecture • Using metrics as a “conversation starter” around agile process improvements • Leveraging continuous integration and quality systems to reduce costs, accelerate schedules, and automate the delivery pipeline • Taming the planning beast with “light-touch” agile planning and lightweight long-range forecasting • Implementing effective project management and ensuring accountability in large agile projects • Managing tradeoffs associated with key decisions about organizational structure • Overcoming U.S./India cultural differences that can complicate offshore development • Selecting tools to support quantum leaps in productivity in your organization • Using change management disciplines to support greater enterprise agility

*Describes an agile process that works on large projects *Ideal for hurried developers who want to develop software in teams *Incorporates real-life C#/.NET web project; can compare this with cases in book