Balancing Agility And Discipline - A Guide For The Perplexed - Barry Boehm, Richard Turner - Addison Wesley - ISBN 0321186125.pdf

Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed
By Barry Boehm, Richard Turner

Publisher: Addison Wesley
Pub Date: August 15, 2003

ISBN: 0-321-18612-5
Pages: 304


"Being a certified bibliophile and a professional geek, I have more shelf space
devoted to books on software methods than any reasonable human should
Agility and Discipline has a prominent place in that section
of my library, because it has helped me sort through the noise and smoke of the
current method wars."
—From the Foreword by Grady Booch
"This is an outstanding book on an plicated topic. I applaud the
authors for the care with which they have handled the subject."
—From the Foreword by Alistair Cockburn
"The authors have done mendable job of identifying five critical factors—
personnel, criticality, size, culture, and dynamism—for creating the right
balance of flexibility and structure. Their thoughtful analysis will help
developers who must sort through the agile-disciplined debate, giving them
guidance to create the right mix for their projects."
—From the Foreword by Arthur Pyster
Agility and disciplined: These apparently opposite attributes are, in fact,
complementary values in software development. Plan-driven developers must
also be agile; nimble developers must also be disciplined. The key to ess is
finding the right balance between the two, which will vary from project to
project according to the circumstances and risks involved. Developers, pulled
toward opposite ends by impassioned arguments, ultimately must learn how to
give each value its due.
Balancing Agility and Discipline begins by defining agility and discipline,
sweeping aside the rhetoric and drilling down to core concepts. The authors
describe a day in the life of developers who live on one side or the other. They
expose the bureaucracy and stagnation that mark discipline without agility, and
they liken agility without disc