Review – Balancing Agility and Discipline

Balancing Agility and DisciplineBalancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed. Barry Boehm and Richard Turner. Addison-Wesley, 2004.

Overall, this is a balanced treatment “agile” and “plan-driven” methods. (My biggest complaint is the title; if it had been “Balancing Agility and Planning” I think it would have been fairer. As Alistair Cockburn points out in one of the forewords, you can have low- or high-discipline agile methods.) The authors present the characteristics of both approaches, and then create a risk-based “scorecard” that tries to balance the risks and benefits of each. Their conclusion is that the different methods have different home grounds, and new methods need to balance both. Especially if you’ve been looking at only classical methods or only agile methods, this book is recommended. (Reviewed Sept., ’05)