Agile Software Development, Alistair Cockburn. Addison-Wesley, 2001.
An excellent overview of agile development. “Software as a cooperative game of invention and communication.” Individuals and teams. Charts as “information radiators.” Describing methodology (it’s harder than it looks). Methodological success: it delivered, the leadership stayed intact, and people would work the same way again. Agility as self-adaptation. “Barely sufficient” methods. The importance of reflection.
Description of the Crystal family: Crystal Clear (incremental delivery, without quite as much required discipline as XP), Crystal Orange (for teams of up to 40 people), and Crystal Orange Web (modified to support a particular web team). Analysis of the agile manifesto.
Finally, includes selections from “Programming as Theory Building” (Naur), “On Participation and Skill” (Ehn), and “The Book of Five Rings” (Musashi). (Reviewed Nov., ’02)